Next: , Previous: Quitting Octave, Up: Getting Started

2.3 Commands for Getting Help

The entire text of this manual is available from the Octave prompt via the command help -i. In addition, the documentation for individual user-written functions and variables is also available via the help command. This section describes the commands used for reading the manual and the documentation strings for user-supplied functions and variables. See Function Files, for more information about how to document the functions you write.

— Command: help

Octave's help command can be used to print brief usage-style messages, or to display information directly from an on-line version of the printed manual, using the GNU Info browser. If invoked without any arguments, help prints a list of all the available operators and functions. If the first argument is -i, the help command searches the index of the on-line version of this manual for the given topics.

For example, the command help help prints a short message describing the help command, and help -i help starts the GNU Info browser at this node in the on-line version of the manual.

Once the GNU Info browser is running, help for using it is available using the command C-h.
See also: doc, which, lookfor.

The help command can give you information about operators, but not the comma and semicolons that are used as command separators. To get help for those, you must type help comma or help semicolon.

— Built-in Function: val = suppress_verbose_help_message ()
— Built-in Function: old_val = suppress_verbose_help_message (new_val)

Query or set the internal vaiable that controls whether Octave will add additional help information to the end of the output from the help command and usage messages for built-in commands.