Authors Adler Andy Institution University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada Source YAPC::NA::2004 (Yet Another Perl Conference, North America), Buffalo, USA, June 16-18, 2004. Title Perl and Inline Octave Abstract I use Perl to manage files, and Octave to crunch numbers. Recently, I worked on a project that generated enormous data files, which needed to be processed and then analysed - a perfect task for my two favourite languages. Since I'd just heard a mighty cool talk on Inline, it seemed clear to me that I needed to write Inline::Octave. Unlike some other Inline languages, such as C or Java, Octave runs as an interpreted environment, and does not natively support sockets or other inter-process communication facilities. The choices were thus: 1) modify octave, or 2) control it from perl by typing into the interpreter, and reading the output. The latter approach was chosen, to allow the technique to work with unmodified Octave. In order to do this, Perl provides the IPC::Open3 to control the Stdin, Stdout, and Stderr of a process, however it contains a number of warnings: for example: "This is very dangerous, as you may block forever." Suitably forewarned, I set out on this hazardous enterprise, learning a number of tricks which I will describe.