The entire text of this manual is available from the Octave prompt via the command help -i. In addition the documentation for individual user-written functions and variables is also available via the help command. This section describes the commands used for reading the manual and the documentation strings for user-supplied functions and variables. See Function Files for more information about how to document the functions you write.
| help | Command |
Octave's help command can be used to print brief usage-style
messages or to display information directly from an on-line version of
the printed manual using the GNU Info browser. If invoked without any
arguments help prints a list of all the available operators,
functions and built-in variables. If the first argument is -i,
the help command searches the index of the on-line version of
this manual for the given topics.
For example the command help help prints a short message
describing the Once the GNU Info browser is running help for using it is available using the command C-h. |
The help command can give you information about operators but not the comma and semicolons that are used as command separators. To get help for those you must type help comma or help semicolon.
| INFO_FILE | Built-in Variable |
The variable INFO_FILE names the location of the Octave info file.
The default value is "octave-home/info/octave.info" in
which octave-home is the directory where all of Octave is installed.
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| INFO_PROGRAM | Built-in Variable |
The variable INFO_PROGRAM names the info program to run. Its
default initial value is
"octave-home/libexec/octave/version/exec/arch/info"
in which octave-home is the directory where all of Octave is
installed version is the Octave version number, and arch
is the system type (for example i686-pc-linux-gnu). The
default initial value may be overridden by the environment variable
OCTAVE_INFO_PROGRAM or the command line argument
--info-program NAME or by setting the value of
INFO_PROGRAM in a startup script
|
| MAKEINFO_PROGRAM | Built-in Variable |
The variable MAKEINFO_PROGRAM names the makeinfo program that
Octave runs to format help text that contains Texinfo markup commands.
Its default initial value is "makeinfo".
|
| suppress_verbose_help_message | Built-in Variable |
If the value of suppress_verbose_help_message is nonzero Octave
will not add additional help information to the end of the output from
the help command and usage messages for built-in commands.
|