MATLAB: Redirection using Unix ‘ls’ list command

Question

Hi,

I quite often use the following command in PC Matlab (as opposed to running Matlab in Unix environment):

!ls *mat > temp.txt;

or

system('ls *mat > temp.txt');

which lists all .mat files, creates a text file, and saves the data file names, one on each line, into the text file. This is very nice.

The thing is that the above command only works on my machine for some reason. I recently found out that none of my coworkers can execute the command although they have exact OS, Matlab version, etc.

I had to modify my scripts using 'dir' or 'diary' instead of 'ls >' for them.

Does anybody have any idea?

Thanks in advance,

Eric

Answer 1

You probably have something like the unix tools installed, or mingw .

! sends the following command to the system shell for the system to process. The command is not processed by Matlab at all. The same with system(). The Matlab version does not matter for this question.

Using command/function duality, you could write a Matlab function named "ls" that did this kind of listing and even looked for the '>' to know where to write the output.

ls *.mat > file.txt

is valid Matlab syntax, meaning

ls('*.mat', '>', 'file.txt')