Another alternative is to write an Octave script to do the same thing as
the Perl script. Once Octave is built, run a script that descends into
the directory tree and extracts the C strings. I'm recalling some
Octave commands that process escape sequences, so maybe the C-string
escape-sequence work intended to avoid is already built into some simply
Octave command. Commands like "dir", etc. give a list of directories,
file names. The advantage is that the Octave script is by default
portable across systems. The drawback is that Octave has to build and
run properly to get the documentation, if that is a problem.