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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.
Octave's
helpcommand 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,helpprints a list of all the available operators, functions, and built-in variables. If the first argument is-i, thehelpcommand 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
helpcommand, and help -i help starts the GNU Info browser at this node in the on-line version of the manual.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.
The variable
INFO_FILEnames 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.
The variable
INFO_PROGRAMnames 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 variableOCTAVE_INFO_PROGRAM, or the command line argument--info-program NAME, or by setting the value ofINFO_PROGRAMin a startup script