GNU Octave Manual by John W. Eaton Paperback (6"x9"), 324 pages, 4 figures ISBN 0954161726 RRP £19.99 ($29.99) Get a printed copy>>>

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B.1 Actual Bugs We Haven't Fixed Yet

• Output that comes directly from Fortran functions is not sent through the pager and may appear out of sequence with other output that is sent through the pager. One way to avoid this is to force pending output to be flushed before calling a function that will produce output from within Fortran functions. To do this, use the command

  fflush (stdout)
  

  Another possible workaround is to use the command

  page_screen_output = "false"
  

  to turn the pager off.
• If you get messages like

  Input line too long
  

  when trying to plot many lines on one graph, you have probably generated a plot command that is too larger for gnuplot's fixed-length buffer for commands. Splitting up the plot command doesn't help because replot is implemented in gnuplot by simply appending the new plotting commands to the old command line and then evaluating it again. You can demonstrate this `feature' by running gnuplot and doing something like

  plot sin (x), sin (x), ... lots more ..., sin (x)
  

  and then

  replot sin (x), sin (x), ... lots more ..., sin (x)
  

  after repeating the replot command a few times, gnuplot will give you an error. Also, it doesn't help to use backslashes to enter a plot command over several lines, because the limit is on the overall command line length, once the backslashed lines are all pasted together. Because of this, Octave tries to use as little of the command-line length as possible by using the shortest possible abbreviations for all the plot commands and options. Unfortunately, the length of the temporary file names is probably what is taking up the most space on the command line. You can buy a little bit of command line space by setting the environment variable TMPDIR to be "." before starting Octave, or you can increase the maximum command line length in gnuplot by changing the following limits in the file plot.h in the gnuplot distribution and recompiling gnuplot.

  #define MAX_LINE_LEN 32768  /* originally 1024 */
  #define MAX_TOKENS 8192     /* originally 400 */
  

  Of course, this doesn't really fix the problem, but it does make it much less likely that you will run into trouble unless you are putting a very large number of lines on a given plot.

A list of ideas for future enhancements is distributed with Octave. See the file ‘PROJECTS’ in the top level directory in the source distribution.