Piping data into Octave

[Matthias Brennwald]

Dear all

Here's my situation: I need to communicate between Octave and a shell  
command. The shell command takes input data from a text file,  
processes this data, and sends the result to stdout. I use Octave's  
system(...) command to do this. I send the output to a text file  
using a pipe. Then, the result data is loaded into Octave by reading  
the contents from disk.

The proplem: If the data becomes too large, the above procedure  
becomes slow. I guess this could be sped up by omitting the data  
transfer through the output file on disk. Can this be done by piping  
the data from the external program directly back into Octave? If so:  
how? Will this work on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X?

Matthias