[Blindmath] new command line processing of Octave 4.0.0

[Rasmussen, Lloyd]

There are, of course, many programs, including editors, which can convert Unix line endings back to DOS/Windows endings. But a quick and dirty way to read an output file is to tell Windows to load it into Wordpad. Just don't tell Wordpad to save it. 
Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress
Washington, DC 20542   202-707-0535
http://www.loc.gov/nls/
The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress, NLS.


-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Godfrey, Jonathan via Blindmath
Sent: Saturday, March 12, 2016 5:02 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Cc: Godfrey, Jonathan
Subject: [Blindmath] new command line processing of Octave 4.0.0

Hi all.

I found that the batch file approach I was trying needed to be altered from older versions of Octave to the new version 4.0.0.

In order of importance:

1.       The path to the m file must be specified, even if that means just saying it is in the current directory using .\ (see example below)

2.       I had to explicitly refer to the command line version to avoid an error being generated. That error message told me to reinstall Octave, which I had tried to no avail. I'm guessing there is a way to use switches instead of the explicit reference to the CLI version.

3.       Piping the results out to a text file is not as good as it used to be as the line breaks are not the correct Windows ones so formatting is lost. The m file must now explicitly state the diary file to send output to. That's probably better practice anyway.

4.       Octave now gets grumpy if an m file is named using a string that is an Octave command. My original file was called test.m which works, but throws a warning. Renaming to something unique helped.

The new command line I have is therefore:
"C:\Octave\Octave-4.0.0\bin\octave-cli" -q .\MyFile.m

I've just tested this on my Windows 7 64 bit laptop without errors. My selection of screen reader is irrelevant as there is no interaction between Octave and the screen when running in batch mode.

Btw: the solution was found via an email list's archive. I love email lists!!!

Cheers,
Jonathan