MATLAB: Is it possible to programmatically check whether MATLAB has been started with the “-nodisplay” option

batchMATLABterminal

I have a program that needs to behave differently depending on whether MATLAB has a display or not. However, I cannot determine a way to programmatically check this.
The reason I need to do this is that I sometimes start MATLAB in batch mode from a shell script, for testing my programs.

Best Answer

The ability to programmatically check whether MATLAB has a display is not available in MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a).
As a workaround, you can do one of the following:
1. Manually set or unset an environment variable in your shell script that launches MATLAB, so you can query it from inside MATLAB. For instance, setting the ISDISPLAY environment variable in your shell script before launching MATLAB:
 setenv ISDISPLAY no
 matlab -r "foo; quit"
(here shown with C Shell syntax), means that the MATLAB command
getenv('ISDISPLAY')
will return the string 'no' in any MATLAB processes that are spawned from this shell.
2. Query the "ScreenSize" property of the root object inside MATLAB:
get(0, 'ScreenSize')
When there is no display, this returns [1 1 1 1] instead of an actual screen size. 
Note that this will only work in releases prior to R2014b.
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