Running external program from Octave

[Lester Anderson]

Hello,

Is there a way to run an external program from within an Octave .m
file? I am using 4.0.2 on Windows, and would like to integrate GMT to
do processing and pass the result back to the main Matlab.

Is the a function equivalent to say:

dos('grdfft test.grd -Gfft.grd -N500/500')

netc

so the GMT program grdfft runs and generates a netCDF file (fft.grd)
which can then be read into Octave (via netcdf package).

Thanks
Lester