Matlab: Running an m-file from command-line

Suppose that;

I have an m-file at location:
C:\M1\M2\M3\mfile.m

And exe file of the matlab is at this location:
C:\E1\E2\E3\matlab.exe

I want to run this m-file with Matlab, from command-line, for example inside a .bat file. How can I do this, is there a way to do it?

A command like this runs the m-file successfully:

"C:\<a long path here>\matlab.exe" -nodisplay -nosplash -nodesktop -r "run('C:\<a long path here>\mfile.m'); exit;"

I think that one important point that was not mentioned in the previous answers is that, if not explicitly indicated, the matlab interpreter will remain open. Therefore, to the answer of @hkBattousai I will add the exit command:

"C:\<a long path here>\matlab.exe" -nodisplay -nosplash -nodesktop -r "run('C:\<a long path here>\mfile.m');exit;"

Here is what I would use instead, to gracefully handle errors from the script:

"C:\<a long path here>\matlab.exe" -nodisplay -nosplash -nodesktop -r "try, run('C:\<a long path here>\mfile.m'), catch, exit, end, exit"

If you want more verbosity:

"C:\<a long path here>\matlab.exe" -nodisplay -nosplash -nodesktop -r "try, run('C:\<a long path here>\mfile.m'), catch me, fprintf('%s / %s\n',me.identifier,me.message), end, exit"

I found the original reference here. Since original link is now gone, here is the link to an alternate newreader still alive today:

• exit matlab when running batch m file

On Linux you can do the same and you can actually send back to the shell a custom error code, like the following:

#!/bin/bash
matlab -nodisplay -nojvm -nosplash -nodesktop -r \ 
      "try, run('/foo/bar/my_script.m'), catch, exit(1), end, exit(0);"
echo "matlab exit code: $?"

it prints matlab exit code: 1 if the script throws an exception, matlab exit code: 0 otherwise.

Here are the steps:

1. Start the command line.
2. Enter the folder containing the .m file with cd C:\M1\M2\M3
3. Run the following: C:\E1\E2\E3\matlab.exe -r mfile

Windows systems will use your current folder as the location for MATLAB to search for .m files, and the -r option tries to start the given .m file as soon as startup occurs.

cat 1.m | matlab -nodesktop -nosplash

And I use Ubuntu

Since R2019b, there is a new command line option, -batch. It replaces -r, which is no longer recommended. It also unifies the syntax across platforms. See for example the documentation for Windows, for the other platforms the description is identical.

matlab -batch "statement to run"

This starts MATLAB without the desktop or splash screen, logs all output to stdout and stderr, exits automatically when the statement completes, and provides an exit code reporting success or error.

It is thus no longer necessary to use try/catch around the code to run, and it is no longer necessary to add an exit statement.

Thanks to malat. Your comment helped me. But I want to add my try-catch block, as I found the MExeption method getReport() that returns the whole error message and prints it to the matlab console.

Additionally I printed the filename as this compilation is part of a batch script that calls matlab.

try
    some_code
    ...
catch message
    display(['ERROR in file: ' message.stack.file])
    display(['ERROR: ' getReport(message)])
end;

For a false model name passed to legacy code generation method, the output would look like:

ERROR in file: C:\..\..\..
ERROR: Undefined function or variable 'modelname'.

Error in sub-m-file (line 63)
legacy_code( 'slblock_generate', specs, modelname);

Error in m-file (line 11)
sub-m-file

Error in run (line 63)
evalin('caller', [script ';']);

Finally, to display the output at the windows command prompt window, just log the matlab console to a file with -logfile logfile.txt (use additionally -wait) and call the batch command type logfile.txt

I run this command within a bash script, in particular to submit SGE jobs and batch process things:

/Path_to_matlab -nodisplay -nosplash -nodesktop < m_file.m

Since none of the answers has information about feeding input argument, it is important to add it here. After some research, I found this link

Feeding the arguments is very similar to how we run a Matlab function.

matlab -r 'try myfunction(argument1,argument2); catch; end; quit'

If you are somehow getting an argument from bash/terminal, you simply need to insert that into the bash command as:

matlab -r 'try myfunction($MY_BASH_ARG,argument2); catch; end; quit'

(This is after a couple of trial and error)