path

Purpose

Control MATLAB's directory search path.

Synopsis

path
p = path
path(p)
path(p1,p2)

Description

MATLAB has a search path. If you enter a name, such as fox, the MATLAB interpreter

1. Looks for fox as a variable.
2. Checks for fox as a built-in function.
3. Looks in the current directory for fox.mex and fox.m.
4. Searches the directories specified by path for fox.mex and fox.m.
path, by itself, prints out the current setting of MATLAB's search path. The search path list originates from the environment variable MATLABPATH in the underlying operating system, which is set in MATLAB's startup script, or is set by matlabrc.m, and is perhaps individualized by startup.m.

p = path returns the current search path in string variable p.

path(p) changes the path to the string in p.

path(p1,p2) changes the path to the concatenation of the two path strings p1 and p2. Thus path(path,p) appends a new directory to the current path and path(p,path) prepends a new path.

Examples

Add a new directory to the search path on various operating systems:

----------------------------------------------------
UNIX:        path(path,'/home/myfriend/goodstuff')     
VMS:         path(path,'DISKS1:[MYFRIEND.GOODSTUFF]')  
MS-DOS:      path(path,'TOOLS\GOODSTUFF')                  
Macintosh:   path(path,'Tools:GoodStuff')              
----------------------------------------------------

See Also

cd, dir, getenv, what

(c) Copyright 1994 by The MathWorks, Inc.