Control Cygwin through Matlab script

Hello, I would consider myself as a rookie matlab user. I have installed Cygwin64 on my computer and use it to process .env files. Instead of processing one by one each .env file I want to create a matlab script which will guide Cygwin64 to the specified directory and process each .env file. How can I create this script? Thanks in advance!

[Walter Roberson]

This confuses me a bit, as cygwin64 provides a shell programming language; you would need a script written in the shell language. Also, env files are associated with environment variables, and it is not common to need to process multiple environment variable files?

[Paschalis Garouniatis]

Hello Walter thanks for the reply. I think I didn't describe correctly my situation. I use Cygwin64 to call an executable and process a specific file (the .env extension maybe was unnecessary info). I thought it would be possible to create a script which would do the following repeatedly: 1)cd (directory) 2)call executable and process a specific file 3)cd (other directory) 4)call executable and process another specific file Those I have to do by myself in every directory and my aim is to create a script which will contain all directories and commands that I need to be executed. That way I will execute through the script all the commands instead of executing every single one. I really hope this was helpful. Also you might need to know that my OS is Windows 10.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The easiest way to handle this is at the shell level, rather than at the MATLAB level.

Create a file that has pairs of items on each line. The first thing on the line should be the directory name, using forward slashes instead of backslashes. If there are any spaces in the directory name, proceed them with spaces. The second thing on the line should be the file name, converted the same way. For illustration I will call this file InputSpecs . For example,

C:/Users/Pas/Documents\ And\ Files/Project1 dataset\ 5a.env
C:/Users/Pas/Documents\ And\ Files/Project7 20150830_second.env

Then prepare a second file, that looks like

while read dirname filename; do cd "$dirname"; COMMANDHERE < "$filename"; done

where COMMANDHERE should be replaced by the name of the executable. If there is some other way to indicate that the file is input, then use that instead of the "<". For illustration I will call this file CommandScript. For example,

while read dirname filename; do cd "$dirname"; afnis -infile "$filename"; done

Then, to run all of those, you can

system("cygwin CommandScript < InputSpecs")

[Paschalis Garouniatis]

Thanks a lot for your help Walter. I will give it a try.

[Paschalis Garouniatis]

Hello Walter. You were right about handling it at the shell level. I finally got up and running. Thanks!