Octave on Windows

[Bill Denney]

Michael Goffioul wrote:
> Although this might not be obvious, octave does the same under Windows
> than under Linux:
> - it loads the system octaverc from the same location:
> <octave_install_dir>/share/octave/3.0.1/m/startup/octaverc
> - it loads the user .octaverc from the same location:
> $HOME/.octaverc
> - "edit" command uses the same default directory:
> $HOME/octave
>
> The problem is that the $HOME concept is not very common under
> Windows. I'd say that the best way to find out where to put your
> .octaverc is to type the following at octave prompt:
>
> tilde_expand ('~\.octaverc')
>   

I was actually looking into this yesterday, and where octave looks for 
the .octaverc file is %USERPROFILE%\.octaverc while if you type "edit 
~/.octaverc", it tries to go to %USERPROFILE\octave\~\.octaverc .  I 
looked into trying to fix this, but I couldn't quickly work through all 
the special cases in the edit.m.

> For the problem of not being able to create a file named .octaverc
> from Explorer, would I dare to say "Blame Microsoft!" :-)
> More seriously, the question here is whether to introduce some
> Windows-specific behavior in octave to work around a stupid
> DOS-inherited problem of Explorer...
The competition uses startup.m.  I posted a revision to some code by 
Kenneth Cate that would search for .octaverc or startup.m a few days ago 
that would be a simple fix 
(http://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/bug-octave/2008-June/006238.html).

Have a good day,

Bill