Once you have learned Octave you may want to write self-contained
Octave scripts using the #! script mechanism. You can do this
on GNU systems and on many Unix systems 1
For example you could create a text file named hello, containing
the following lines:
#! octave-interpreter-name -qf
# a sample Octave program
printf ("Hello world!\n");
(where octave-interpreter-name should be replaced with the full
file name for your Octave binary). After making this file executable
(with the chmod command) you can simply type:
hello
at the shell and the system will arrange to run Octave as if you had typed:
octave hello
The line beginning with #! lists the full file name of an
interpreter to be run and an optional initial command line argument to
pass to that interpreter. The operating system then runs the
interpreter with the given argument and the full argument list of the
executed program. The first argument in the list is the full file name
of the Octave program. The rest of the argument list will either be
options to Octave or data files, or both. The -qf option is
usually specified in stand-alone Octave programs to prevent them from
printing the normal startup message and to keep them from behaving
differently depending on the contents of a particular user's
~/.octaverc file. See Invoking Octave. Note that some
operating systems may place a limit on the number of characters that are
recognized after #!.
Self-contained Octave scripts are useful when you want to write a program which users can invoke without knowing that the program is written in the Octave language.
If you invoke an executable Octave script with command line arguments
the arguments are available in the built-in variable argv.
See Command Line Options. For example the following program will
reproduce the command line that is used to execute it.
#! /bin/octave -qf
printf ("%s" program_name);
for i = 1:nargin
printf (" %s" argv{i});
endfor
printf ("\n");