But since the DOS interface is not that comprehensive (rather not well known as compared to UNIX shell commands) the dos(‘command’) is hardly used.

Now coming to Windows, we have something similar to the above. Matlab can also run PERL scripts by using the perl(‘perlfile’) command. This can be used to open any PDF file or used in a loop to open file after file in that directory. evince here is a document reader and the & is appended to push the process to back. So basically, I am concatenating the string of variables (path) and structures (pdfiles.name) and constant text and feeding it to the Matlab prompt to evaluate by using the unix command.

So the point I was trying to make above when I talked about variables in commands is something like: The command is also called unix(‘command’). In Matlab for UNIX one can use all the shell commands that are generally available in the Linux / Unix terminal. This is solved by using the OS specific commands which are given below. You cannot use or substitute values of variables in such commands and thats a big problem. Though, the major disadvantage with this type of input is the inability to use Matlab to the fullest. You will see exactly the same things that appear on the terminal / command prompt. For example try: !ping at your Matlab prompt. The simplest way is to use the ! before the command. First the OS independent way, then for the Unix based commands and finally for Windows. We shall divide this into 3 ways for ease of understanding. Another interesting feature that Matlab supports is to allow the usage of operating system commands either by using functions or a character identifier.

Evince pdf reader command line loop