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Chapter 16: Input and Output 10916 Input and OutputThere are two distinct classes of input and output functions. The first set are modeledafter the functions available in Matlab. The second set are modeled after the standardI/O library used by the C programming language and offer more flexibility and control overthe output.When running interactively, Octave normally sends any output intended for your terminalthat is more than one screen long to a paging program, such as less or more. Thisavoids the problem of having a large volume of output stream by before you can read it.With less (and some versions of more) you can also scan forward and backward, and searchfor specific items.Normally, no output is displayed by the pager until just before Octave is ready to printthe top level prompt, or read from the standard input (for example, by using the fscanf orscanf functions). This means that there may be some delay before any output appears onyour screen if you have asked Octave to perform a significant amount of work with a singlecommand statement. The function fflush may be used to force output to be sent to thepager (or any other stream) immediately.You can select the program to run as the pager by setting the variable PAGER, and youcan turn paging off by setting the value of the variable page_screen_output to 0.moreCommandmore onCommandmore offCommandTurn output pagination on or off. Without an argument, more toggles the currentstate.PAGERBuilt-in VariableThe default value is normally "less", "more", or "pg", depending on what programsare installed on your system. See Appendix C [Installation], page 329.When running interactively, Octave sends any output intended for your terminal thatis more than one screen long to the program named by the value of the variable PAGER.page screen outputBuilt-in VariableIf the value of page_screen_output is nonzero, all output intended for the screen thatis longer than one page is sent through a pager. This allows you to view one screenfulat a time. Some pagers (such as less—see Appendix C [Installation], page 329) arealso capable of moving backward on the output. The default value is 1.page output immediatelyBuilt-in VariableIf the value of page_output_immediately is nonzero, Octave sends output to thepager as soon as it is available. Otherwise, Octave buffers its output and waits untiljust before the prompt is printed to flush it to the pager. The default value is 0.