Octave newbie

[Tom Coffey]

I have a windows machine and recently downloaded Octave. I can run Octave by
selecting it from the pulldown menu:"Start->All Programs->Gnu Octave->
Octave". However, The only time I can run Octave from a DOS shell is when I
change directories to "C:Program Files\Octave\bin".  In my company's path
tree it is common to find white space and other undesireable characters like
&,#,etc.

What do I need to do so that I can run Octave from a DOS shell such that
Octave is "looking at" the directory from which I invoked octave?

Thanks in advance