GNU Octave Wiki

GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and for performing other numerical experiments. It also provides extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation. GNU Octave is normally used through its interactive interface (CLI and GUI), but it can also be used to write non-interactive programs. The GNU Octave language is quite similar to Matlab so that most programs are easily portable.

Installing

Get installers and sources from http://octave.org/download (Beta installer for Mac OS X). Some installation instructions given here.

Building together with a separate toolchain (custom built gcc version) is described here.

GNU Octave 9.2.0 is the current stable release

Are you using an old version of Octave? Check the Release History page to see how old it is.

News

OctConf 2018 at CERN

June 1, 2024 GNU Octave 9.2.0 has been released (see above)!

Octave is a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2017. Student applications are due April 3, 2017.

Getting help with GNU Octave

Read the GNU Octave documentation
The frequently asked questions (FAQ) list is good place to start with answers to questions regarding what is Octave, licensing, new features, documentation, installation, coding, contributing to Octave, and more, are found there.
Continue reading this wiki and feel free to add further content (please check that it is not already part of, or belongs in, the documentation and read the Contribution guidelines).
Other support options

Advanced topics

Below is a temporary attempt to organize the "most wanted" pages of the Wiki. A list of all pages on the wiki can be seen here. To locate something specific, try the wiki's search box, or prepend site:wiki.octave.org to a Google search. Please read the Contribution guidelines first, if you want to contribute to this Wiki.

Packages

Octave-Forge

See also the list of Forge Wiki pages: Category:Octave-Forge

bim package Solve Partial Differential Equations with a Finite Element method
Control package
CGI Common Gateway Interface for Octave
Dataframe package cell arrays on steroids
Dicom package
fem-fenics Interface to FEnics FEM library
Geometry package
Image package
Image acquisition package Capture images, for example from v4l2 hardware like webcams
Instrument control package
Interval package Real-valued interval arithmetic
I/O package
Java package
Mechanics package
ncArray High-level interface of accessing a single or a collection of NetCDF files as a multi-dimensional array
netcdf matlab-compatible NetCDF package
octcdf NetCDF package (old)
OCS package Octave Circuit Simulator
optiminterp Optimal interpolation
Parallel package
Sockets package
Symbolic package
TISEAN package
Video package
Scilab co-simulation package

Editors

Gedit
Emacs
Nano
Vim
Kate
Octclipse (Windows and GNU/Linux only. The Octclipse developers are seeking individuals to assist with MacOS X support.)
DomainMath IDE (Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS.)
GNU Octave syntax highlight files (Syntax highlight definitions for some editors. Contributions are welcome)

Tutorials/Examples

Using Octave - For those just getting started.
Octave Basics - A short reference card to get started.
Octave introduction script
Tips and tricks - Guidelines to improve your coding skills.
Cookbook - Several simple and useful examples.
Octave load - Use liboctave functions to load variables from a file in Octave's binary format.
Fortran - Accessing liboctave from a Fortran 2003 program.
Octave fun - Coding can be fun -- miscellaneous more or less funny scripts
Video tutorials
Plotting tutorials
How to Connect SystemVerilog with Octave