Octave commands

I am trying to run Matlab based test statistics in GNU Octave.

Octave commands 

List variables available in memory

who %this is a comment
whos %provides class details

Change and display working directory

cd directory_name
pwd

Manipulate data structures:

x.a = 1;
x.b = [1, 2; 3, 4];
x.c = "string";

Display the value of a variable

disp(x)

Loop over a list of files

csvfiles = dir("*.csv")
for file= csvfiles'
fprintf(1,'Doing something with %s\n',file.name)
end

Creating character arrays

"In the MATLAB^® computing environment, all variables are arrays, and strings are of type char (character arrays)."

Reading data from an Excel or CSV file

The test statistics I wanted to use loads data from an Excel file but this returned the error :" 'xlsread' undefined ". Reading excel file is provided by the IO package which is not installed by default. The package is available in the Debian repository under "octave-io" , with the description "This package [...] contains functions to [...] read Excel spreadsheet (xlsread) and OpenDocument spreadsheet (odsread)." It is based on Apache POI. Load the package an try to read a file:

pkg load io;
data=xlsread('file_name.xls');

xlsread returns an error "Detected XLS interfaces: None."  This forum post recommends to load the java and windows packages as well. Those packages are not available in the Debian repositories.
I decided to convert the Excel file to csv and use csvread instead.

The script now gives the same output as on a windows machine running Matlab.

Warning: possible Matlab-style short-circuit operator 

Short-circuit boolean operators explains that:

"MATLAB has special behavior that allows the operators ‘&’ and ‘|’ to short-circuit when used in the truth expression for if and while statements. The Octave parser may be instructed to behave in the same manner, but its use is strongly discouraged." [...]

I wonder why it is strongly discouraged. 

"To obtain short-circuit behavior for logical expressions in new programs, you should always use the ‘&&’ and ‘||’ operators."

I replaced "|" by "||" in the code.

Writing test results to a file

Matlab low level file IO, explains how to use fprintf (a vectorised implementation of the c function) to write text data to a file.