Using octave from command line

[tim willaert]

Hello all,
My question is pretty basic I think, but I can’t seem to be able to run octave 
from the command line. I can run the GUI or CLI mode by clicking the shortcut 
in ‘applications’, and once I’m inside of octave everything seems to work 
nicely. But now I would need to use an octave script to transform multiple data 
files and I’m trying to do this in a loop, from a bash script. So I thought I 
would include a line like ‘octave nameOfOctaveFile_i in that loop, where 
’nameOfOctavefile_i’ processes my original i-th datafile into my i-th 
resultful. But the command line doesnt seem to recognise ‘octave’, so I started 
trying it without the loop just in a terminal window in all kinds of locations 
to try invoking octave from command line, but it never seems to work. I’ve 
searched on lots of guides but there it is always assumed that typing ‘octave’ 
on the command line should start the program. I’ve tried from my home 
directory, from the directory usr/local/octave/bin (where all the executables 
like octave-3.8.0 and octave-cli are located), but the result is always 
‘octave:command not found’. Can someone tell me what I should do to make the 
terminal recofgnize this command? I read something about adding to the path 
variable, but what path should I add exactly to the path variable and how can I 
do this in a safe way? (I’m using a macbook pro with Yosemite and octave 3.8.0) 
Thanks very much!