Octave bug: subfunctions not found after cd, and octave hangs

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Apr-2009, Giddy Landan wrote:

| This bug arose when I tried to run m-functions in some data directories not
| in the
| octave path. Typically, my first command is a cd to the target dir, and then
| the subfunctions are not found and octave hangs with no error message, and
| only a double
| ^c will kill octave.
| 
| It is a fine balance depending on these factors:
| 1. the m-file is not in the octave path
| 2. cd is called before ANY of the subfunctions
| 3. rehashing
| 
| octave version:
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| GNU Octave Version 3.0.3
| GNU Octave License: GNU General Public License
| Operating System: CYGWIN_NT-5.1 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-06-12 19:34 i686
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| attached is a stripped down m file demonstrating the bug.

I see

  octave:1> octave_hangs
  ans = hello world instance: after cd - function hw is not found, unless line 7 is un-remarked

with Octave 3.1.54 (a recent snapshot of the development sources) so I
think this bug has been fixed for the next release.

It won't be fixed for 3.0.x since we are done making 3.0.x releases
and the symbol table code has changed significantly in going from
3.0.x to 3.1.x, so there is no simple way to extract a patch from the
3.1.x sources and apply it to the 3.0.x sources.

jwe