37.3 Administrating Packages

On UNIX-like systems it is possible to make both per-user and system-wide installations of a package. If the user performing the installation is root the packages will be installed in a system-wide directory that defaults to OCTAVE_HOME/share/octave/packages/. If the user is not root the default installation directory is ~/octave/. Packages will be installed in a subdirectory of the installation directory that will be named after the package. It is possible to change the installation directory by using the pkg prefix command

pkg prefix new_installation_directory

The current installation directory can be retrieved by typing

current_installation_directory = pkg ("prefix")

To function properly the package manager needs to keep some information about the installed packages. For per-user packages this information is by default stored in the file ~/.octave_packages and for system-wide installations it is stored in OCTAVE_HOME/share/octave/octave_packages. The path to the per-user file can be changed with the pkg local_list command

pkg local_list /path/to/new_file

For system-wide installations this can be changed in the same way using the pkg global_list command. If these commands are called without a new path, the current path will be returned.