I was wondering how to open or read a binary file that has been saved in octave, with the extension .SAVE? I have tried opening it with MATLAB, using the 'load' function in octave, but nothing seems to be working. I'm trying to understand someone else's code and they have saved the output of a simulation in this file.
The Octave binary format is briefly described in the comments before the function read_binary_data() in load-save.cc.
Are you sure the file is in "Octave binary format". The file ending ".SAVE" can be choosen arbitrary so this could also be CSV, gzipped...
You can run "file yourfile.SAFE" and paste the output or check the first bytes of your file if they are "Octave-1-L" or "Octave-1-B".
If you want to use these files from another program than GNU Octave I would suggest loading it in Octave and safe it in an other format. See "help save" for a list of supported formats.
EDIT: Because the initial poster asked: Of course you can use GNU Octave from the terminal (no need for the GUI and I don't now to which software part you refer when you are using the phrase "octave GUI", see here Octave FAQ). Just install it for your used platform install instructions on wiki.octave.org and run it.