Also confirmed that Perl is not initialized correctly if launched in the background.

perl -de 42 &

The perl interpreter works, but since there is no echo one is programming blind.

That's a good test for the difference in terminal line settings.  They are obviously different for the background to foreground step.  I will point out, though, that even though the Octave command line terminal echo seems inactive, this isn't any different than what happens for python (where I've typed "exit()" in both scenarios:

linux@ ~/octave $ python
Python 2.7.12 (default, Nov 19 2016, 06:48:10)
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> exit()
linux@ ~/octave $ python &
[1] 3132
linux@ ~/octave $ Python 2.7.12 (default, Nov 19 2016, 06:48:10)
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.


[1]+  Stopped                 python
linux@ ~/octave $ fg
python
>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> linux@ ~/octave $
linux@ ~/octave $
linux@ ~/octave $

Is there some type of command-line option for "fg" that will reinstate the terminal settings?  I can't find a man page for fg, or any command-line help dump.  Also, after having done the background-to-foreground step, the shell "reset" in the drop-down menu doesn't fix the problem.