Is Octave's pipe function supported on Windows7?

Question

I am trying to use multicore-0.2.15 toolbox with Octave v3.6.4 on Windows7 64bit ( http://octave.sourceforge.net/multicore/ ) but even the demo script doesn't seem to work, it's not possible to create a pipe and I received an error message. So if I try to evaluate the following command in Octave

[read_fd, write_fd, err, msg] = pipe ()

I receive the following output:

read_fd = -1
write_fd = -1
err = -1
msg = pipe: not supported on this system

The fork function doesn't work either. Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be?

Zoltan

Answer 1

The error message pipe: not supported on this system says it all. There is no support for pipe() in your system (Windows 7). You can:

1. Not use the multicore which you will notice is unmaintained (see the unmaintained section at the bottom of the package list). You could instead use the parallel package.
2. Try another build of Octave. Maybe the MinGW builds will work with pipes.
3. Try another version of Octave. Version 3.8.1 has already been released and if it is a problem on the side of Octave instead of Windows, maybe it has been fixed.
4. Change operating system (pipe() works fine in Debian)