From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Thu Jan 15 03:42:02 2004
Subject: Re: alias-like function?
From: Geraint Paul Bevan <g dot bevan at mech dot gla dot ac dot uk>
To: Avraham Rosenberg <avrahamr at weizmann dot ac dot il>
CC: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren_Hauberg?= <soren at hauberg dot org>,    help-octave <help-octave@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 09:49:00 +0000

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Avraham Rosenberg wrote:
| I read your mail and thought: what I nice trick.
| But when I tried it, octave refused to behave. It complained instead of
| "octlc undefined near line 4 column 1"
| octave 2.1.50 on debian 3.0r1
| 1028~> EXEC_PATH
| EXEC_PATH =
|
/home/avraham/matcompat/bin::/home/avraham/scripts:/usr/local/MuPaD_200/share/bin:/home/avraham/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games
|
| The script octlc -a copy of the one you posted is in
| /home/avraham/matcompat/bin and it is executable.
| Moreover, while the binary files in the path are recognized by octave,
| it balks at all my scripts (starting with the magic #!/bin/sh
| sequence).
| Any suggestions ?
| Thanks, Avraham
|


The problem here is that Octave doesn't usually try to run shell scripts
or other system calls when functions are called. It usually looks for .m
and .oct files; "ls" is a special case.

If you want the command "octlc" to run a bash shell script in Octave,
the easiest way is to create a wrapper "octlc.m" which uses the "system"
function and to place it in your Octave path:


geraint at pavilion:~$ cat bin/octlc
#!/bin/sh
echo Hello World

geraint at pavilion:~$ cat octlc.m
system ("/home/geraint/bin/octlc");

geraint at pavilion:~$ octave -q
octave:1> octlc
Hello World
octave:2>


Inidentally, the "ls" script I posted before should have had $* at the
end of the command so that ls would continue to accept arguments from
the shell:

#! /bin/sh
exec /bin/ls --color $*


- --
Geraint Bevan
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/geraint.bevan

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