Question

$ matlab -nodesktop -nojvm &

How would I execute matlab commands on the session that was just created?

In other words, I want to have a matlab session running in the background, and execute matlab commands and/or scripts from an arbitrary terminal at any given time without having to create a new session.

Answer 1

I would suggest a similar solution as carandraug did, only I prefer tmux as the multiplexer. It may be a bit tricky getting the commands passed in correctly so create a shell-script that handles the details.

Let’s say you’ve started matlab in a terminal like this:

tmux new -s matlab "matlab -nodesktop -nojvm"

Now a tmux session called matlab is running matlab with no gui.

Create this shell-script:

mx

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
  while read; do
    tmux send-keys -t matlab "$REPLY"$'\n'
  done
else
  tmux send-keys -t matlab "$@"$'\n'
fi

In a different terminal you can now run quoted matlab commands:

mx "A = reshape(1:9, 3, 3)"

Or even pass commands in through a pipe:

for mat in A B C; do echo "$mat = reshape(1:9, 3, 3)"; done | mx