Comment 4 for bug 1524251

Ok, then what I believe you are seeing is the expected behavior in the current version of Octave. To explain a little further:

Double-clicking an m file, say myfile.m, runs the command "octave --force-gui myfile.m". The current behavior of Octave 4.0 is to run the script defined in that file to completion, and then exit. This sounds like what you are seeing.

If you instead run "octave --force-gui --persist myfile.m" then the Octave GUI will stay active and accept further interactive commands.

If you'd like to propose different functionality for what Octave should do when an m file is double-clicked, it would be best to open a feature request bug report against the upstream project here: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=octave