Just because it took me ages to hunt down the answer to this question, I'm writing it here for permanence:
How to read CSV files into GNU Octave? Use the "dlmread" function. Type "help dlmread" for details, but it's easy to use - just call dlmread(<>). It's part of the octave-forge extensions rather than the main thing, but those extensions are bundled with most common downloads of Octave.