1.2.8 Help and Documentation

Octave has an extensive help facility. The same documentation that is available in printed form is also available from the Octave prompt, because both forms of the documentation are created from the same input file.

In order to get good help you first need to know the name of the command that you want to use. This name of the function may not always be obvious, but a good place to start is to just type help. This will show you all the operators, reserved words, functions, built-in variables, and function files. An alternative is to search the documentation using the lookfor function. This function is described in Commands for Getting Help.

Once you know the name of the function you wish to use, you can get more help on the function by simply including the name as an argument to help. For example,

help plot

will display the help text for the plot function.

Octave sends output that is too long to fit on one screen through a pager like less or more. Type a <RET> to advance one line, a <SPC> to advance one page, and <q> to exit the pager.

The part of Octave's help facility that allows you to read the complete text of the printed manual from within Octave normally uses a separate program called Info. When you invoke Info you will be put into a menu driven program that contains the entire Octave manual. Help for using Info is provided in this manual in Commands for Getting Help.