Please provide a function that users and third-party packages can rely on inside of Octave to get the suffix / file extension for executable programs.

For example, on Unix and GNU/Linux operating systems this would return the empty string, and on Windows this would return '.exe'.

Inside of Octave, m-file functions use

ext = __octave_config_info__ ("EXEEXT");

This works fine for Octave itself, but is not a function that should be relied on for code outside of Octave. So Octave should provide an equivalent that can be used safely.

As a motivating example, the Octave Forge package 'miscellaneous' shells out to the program 'units'. It has a check that the executable 'units' exists in PATH, but it has to append EXEEXT to ensure that it works on Windows.

function fpath = check_units ()
  ## See bug #38270 about why we're checking this way.
  fpath = file_in_path (getenv ("PATH"), sprintf ("units%s", octave_config_info ("EXEEXT")));
  if (isempty (fpath))
    error ("units: %s\nVerify that GNU units is installed in the current path.",
           rawoutput);
  endif
endfunction