Question

Is there a possibility to use Octave headless.

Something like this

octave < "5+4" >result.txt


Answer 1

Using

octave --silent --eval 5+4 > result.txt

you’ll get

ans =  9

in result.txt. See octave --help for details about command-line arguments.

Yet, there is this infamous ans = that might be remove using sed, e.g.

octave --silent --eval 'x=5+4; y=x+1; disp(y)' | sed -e 's/ans = //' >> result.txt

which add the appropriate result (10) in result.txt.

It should not be too hard to wrap this into a bash script.