running a .m file in Octave

[Kevin Freund]

I’m very new to Octave and I downloaded it because I found a .m file for Matlab and discovered that the open source program Gnu Octave would run such files and is almost the same as Matlab.

 

It is a geodetic function that performs a Helmert 3D transformation using as input 2 cartesian (XYZ) files in different datums to apply a least squares adjustment to produce 7 parameters.

The parameters are 3 x y z shifts, 3 rotations and a scale factor.

 

I can’t get the program to run I don’t understand exactly how to do it.

 

Firstly I thought that just putting the name in the command window would do it, after I amended the first line to add the correct parameters in the brackets.

It kept giving error undefined in line 1 column 1.

I found an explanation that there must be no capital letters anywhere in the function where small letters were used earlier.

 

I can’t remember all the things I have tried but once yesterday it gave an indication that the input file I had named infile1.txt was wrong by putting a small arrow under the “1”.

I have now changed the names to inA.txt and inB.txt.

 

This morning I put the word run before the file, (helmert3d.m) and it came up with error in the SCRIPT at line 58 col 5.

 

I also downloaded from Octave forge, the example package and tried to run the .m file in it. It said somewhere that I had to load the package but I couldn’t achieve that either.

 

I’ll attach the Helmert file and my 2 input files.

 

Any help would be appreciated because there are not many standalone programs to implement this function.

 

Kevin Freund

helmert3d.m
Description: Binary data

InA.txt
Description: Text document

inB.txt
Description: Text document