This simplistic and hacked program is able to convert many of the files that come with The Practise of Statisics into something GNU Octave can understand. These sets of data can be downloaded at the book's companion website. Here is a direct link to the file containing the downloadable files.
This program uses the first line of the file to determine the
variable names for octave. It reads data from standard input and
writes to standard output. It doesn't need to be able to fseek
around in those streams, so it should be pipe-safe. Here is the
source code in totallity. It is
released under the GNU Affero Public
License. You may compile it using something like gcc -o pstat2octave pstat2octave.c. Gentoo users might want to
use gcc -Wall -o pstat2octave $(portageq envvar CFLAGS) $(portageq envvar LDFLAGS) pstat2octave.c :-).
If you have problems with this program, please just email me at (see footer of page for email) I may actually be able to help you.