ls command not working properly with Slurm

Hi,

I'm trying to run a Matlab script with my company's cluster (managed with Slurm). At some point, my script contains a simple

listSuj = ls('Suj*');

command, which works properly when I run the script locally, but does not work as expected when I run it on the cluster. Specifically, on top of returning a list of files or folders whose name begins by 'Suj', it returns the contents of these folders.

I suspect it is due to some interference with the Unix ls command, but I have little to no experience about Unix unfortunately...

Could anyone please let me know how to get Matlab's ls function to run properly?

Thanks!

Emma

[Kojiro Saito]

It might be the current directory of MATLAB from SLURM is not as you expected.

What the

pwd

returns?

And how about adding the following in the first place of MATLAB codes?

cd /path/to/your/directory

[EmmaB]

Hi Kojiro,

Thank you for your reply.

I actually cd to the correct directory (with absolute path) just above the ls command, so it's not an issue about the current working directory.

I forgot to mention that I'm a Windows user, if that might be of interest.

Also, the issue is solved when I use

[~, cmdout] = system('ls -d * |grep -i suj');

i.e., it returns a list of the desired folders, but in the form of a character vector, which I then have to sparse into an array of strings, and it is kind of bothersome anyway.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

[Jan]

Using ls to get a list of files or folders is a bad idea in any way. It replies the list a char array, but it is hard to use. So maybe there is another reason to use dir instead:

List = dir('Subj*');
FileName = fullfile({List.folder}, {List.name})

Working with absolute path names is more secure, because the current directory can be changed unexpectedly by callbacks of GUIs or timer 's.

[EmmaB]

Thanks Jan.

Although I thought I had already tried it,

dir('Subj*');

did work!