RE: I am struggling to have the eig built in function work for me. Is there a new version of this code?

[Richardson, Anthony]

Are you using Octave 3.6?  From the NEWS file:

** The ARPACK library is no longer distributed with Octave.
    If you need the eigs or svds functions you must provide an
    external ARPACK through a package manager or by compiling it
    yourself.  If a pre-compiled package does not exist for your system,
    you can find the current ARPACK sources at
    http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/arpack-ng

The ARPACK library is still distributed with the Windows/MinGW binary
from source forge, so if this is a problem I would assume you are using
another binary release or are building from source.

Tony Richardson