Executing Abaqus from Scilab

I have managed to adjust a material property to get the best fit to the experimental response using fminsearch in MATLAB, but I lost access to free MATLAB so I have to use something else. I like Scilab, it works for everything I did with MATLAB except this. 

Scilab throughs and 'invalid handle' error when executing:

  dos('abaqus cae -nogui response.py','-echo');

at the line inside response.py:

  Job.submit(consistencyChecking=OFF)

It seems that Scilab opens a dos shell to execute abaqus but 'response.py' has this line inside it:

  Job.submit(consistencyChecking=OFF)

and the echo option returns this:

  Abaqus Error: cae exited with an error. 

I look inside abaqus.rpy, where I found that the error is 'invalid handle' while executing line 361 in response.py, and line 361 is 'Job.submit(consistencyChecking=OFF)' 

Needless to say, I verified that I can run:

  abaqus cae -nogui response.py

at a black dos shell (dos prompt), no problem, and using MATLAB that used to work, and did not change anything in response.py, I just translated the minimizaion code in Scilab. I checked the new code line by line, all works except:

    dos('abaqus cae -nogui response.py','-echo');

which I can write like this, but then I get no error message: 

  dos('abaqus cae -nogui response.py');

Does anyone know how to solve this? maybe another MATLAB-alike to use?