11.13 Organization of Functions Distributed with Octave

Many of Octave’s standard functions are distributed as function files. They are loosely organized by topic, in subdirectories of octave-home/lib/octave/version/m, to make it easier to find them.

The following is a list of all the function file subdirectories, and the types of functions you will find there.

@ftp

Class functions for the FTP object.

+containers

Package for the containers classes.

audio

Functions for playing and recording sounds.

deprecated

Out-of-date functions which will eventually be removed from Octave.

elfun

Elementary functions, principally trigonometric.

general

Miscellaneous matrix manipulations, like flipud, rot90, and triu, as well as other basic functions, like ismatrix, narginchk, etc.

geometry

Functions related to Delaunay triangulation.

gui

Functions for GUI elements like dialog, message box, etc.

help

Functions for Octave’s built-in help system.

image

Image processing tools. These functions require the X Window System.

io

Input-output functions.

java

Functions related to the Java integration.

linear-algebra

Functions for linear algebra.

miscellaneous

Functions that don’t really belong anywhere else.

ode

Functions to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs).

optimization

Functions related to minimization, optimization, and root finding.

path

Functions to manage the directory path Octave uses to find functions.

pkg

Package manager for installing external packages of functions in Octave.

plot

Functions for displaying and printing two- and three-dimensional graphs.

polynomial

Functions for manipulating polynomials.

prefs

Functions implementing user-defined preferences.

set

Functions for creating and manipulating sets of unique values.

signal

Functions for signal processing applications.

sparse

Functions for handling sparse matrices.

specfun

Special functions such as bessel or factor.

special-matrix

Functions that create special matrix forms such as Hilbert or Vandermonde matrices.

startup

Octave’s system-wide startup file.

statistics

Statistical functions.

strings

Miscellaneous string-handling functions.

testfun

Functions for performing unit tests on other functions.

time

Functions related to time and date processing.