MATLAB: Accessing a symbolically-linked class in r2007b

MATLABoopr2007bsymbolic links

Hey all,

I'm running into a problem while trying to instantiate some classes, running r2007b. I have a central location where I store most of my completed projects and utilities. When I need to access one of these in a new project, rather than adding the central location to my path, I create a symbolic link to the needed application somewhere in the directory structure of the project I'm working on. This is intended to allow me to make bug-fixes in one location, which propagate to all instances where the application is used. This worked well for me until I tried to link to a class directory.

Using the standard 'ln -s' syntax in terminal, I created a link to the directory '@foo' in my central storage directory. I then verified that the link was valid by navigating to the directory of my current project, checking that '@foo' existed and was a symbolic link, and then double-clicking it to find myself back in the central storage directory. However, when I tried to instantiate the class with the command 'bar = foo', Matlab was unable to locate the class. I ensured that the root directory 'example_proj' was on the path, and 'example_proj/@foo' was not, with no change in the results. I then removed the symbolic link, and copied the class directly to the root directory. Matlab was then able to find the class. Does Matlab not allow the use of symbolically-linked classes in 2007b?

Best Answer

Issues with symbolic links have been discussed before. In that question, Walter pointed out that MATLAB handles links in a POSIX compliant way, but that the POSIX behavior is not obvious.

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