For example, Octave was used on a massive parallel computer at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to find vulnerabilities related to guessing social security numbers.

[27] Because Octave is made available under the GNU General Public License, it may be freely changed, copied and used.

[8] The program runs on Microsoft Windows and most Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including Linux, Android, and macOS.

[31] When running interactively, Octave saves the commands typed in an internal buffer so that they can be recalled and edited.

Octave includes the C-like increment and decrement operators ++ and -- in both their prefix and postfix forms.

The general form of an unwind_protect block looks like this: As a general rule, GNU Octave recognizes as termination of a given block either the keyword end (which is compatible with the MATLAB language) or a more specific keyword endblock or, in some cases, end_block.

Second, after the execution of exception_handling the exception is not propagated outside the block (unless a rethrow( lasterror ) statement is explicitly inserted within the exception_handling code).

Octave has a mechanism for handling functions that take an unspecified number of arguments without explicit upper limit.

However, while they are often provided and uploaded by users under an Octave compatible and proper open source BSD license, the FileExchange Terms of use prohibit any usage beside MathWorks' proprietary MATLAB.

The functions available as part of either core Octave or Forge packages are listed online Archived 2024-03-14 at the Wayback Machine.

When an unimplemented function is called the following error message is shown: Octave comes with an official graphical user interface (GUI) and an integrated development environment (IDE) based on Qt.

Alternatives to GNU Octave under an open source license, other than the aforementioned MATLAB, include Scilab and FreeMat.