QuickTip: Adding Search Paths in Octave

Suppose you want a utility (such as matrixTeX.m) to be visible to every octave session.

1. Select a suitable folder to keep your local octave files in (e.g. /home/sachin/octave/ on my Linux box). If such a folder doesn't exist, make one.

2.  Fire up an octave session

3. In Octave, add the path to the path variable:

octave:> addpath(genpath("/home/sachin/octave")) 

4. List directories in default path (your output will likely look different)

octave:> path 

/home/sachin/octave
/home/sachin/octave/io-2.4.11
/home/sachin/octave/io-2.4.11/doc
/home/sachin/octave/io-2.4.11/packinfo
/home/sachin/octave/io-2.4.11/templates

etc.

4. So far, we haven't permanently written the modified path to disk. To do this:

octave:> savepath