I have recently started using MATLAB without GUI by starting matlab with -nodesktop option and it is considerably faster.
However presently I have no way to debug a .m script in non gui mode. I have to open the default matlab editor every time I have to debug.Has anyone figured out a way to do it?
Thanks in advance
I am using Ubuntu Linux, in case that helps.
To set breakpoints with the command line, dbstop
is the tool (plus dbclear
to clear breakpoints and dbstatus
to list them).
There are presently 17 different forms to dbstop
, which allow you to specify various combinations of:
- The M-file in which to stop
- Line number
- Sub-function
Conditional to an arbitrary expression. For example,
dbstop in myFun.m at 224 if ~exist('x','var')
- At any run-time error (
dbstop if error
)
- At a specific error (e.g
dbstop if error myFun.m:barErrorId
)
- At any warning (
dbstop if warning
) or specific warning
- If
NaN
or Inf
are encountered (dbstop if naninf
)
See the documentation for dbstop
for details and good examples.
Also get used to dbcont
(or F5), dbstep
(or F10), dbquit
(Shift+F5), dbstep
(also dbstep in
, dbstep out
), dbstack
(to see where you are and how you got there). The keyboard shortcuts may be different outside of Windows.
Far less used, but still very useful are dbup
and dbdown
, which allow you to switch workspace context (memory stacks).
See the summary of functions and a list of examples and how-to pages in the MathWorks page on Debugging.
Related to the "db
" functions is checkcode
, which will check your code for possible problems before you even run it. This is a nice substitute for the red squiggly underlines that you would get in the MATLAB Editor.
Once you get a hang of dbstop
and it's syntax, you won't often need to insert a keyboard
into your code, but it's always an option.
Try placing the keyboard
command in your code to insert a breakpoint. When the keyboard
command is reached, MATLAB will drop into an interactive prompt that you can use to inspect variables. For example:
x = rand(10,10);
y = rand(10,5);
z = x * y;
keyboard; % you can interactively inspect x, y, z here
z = sort(z);
To leave keyboard mode, you can type dbquit
to exit the program, or return
to continue executing the program.
Another trick is to turn on dbstop if error
which will automatically drop you into an interactive prompt whenever your code crashes.
You can use MATLAB -Dgdb
if that helps. This sets gdb as the debugger. You will need to be familiar with gdb of course.
Once you do that, use the standard gdb commands to debug it.
EDIT
My mistake. Above won't work for M-Files. (Not having MATLAB to try things out is a pain :)
MATLAB has a pretty good set of debugging commands you can use from the commandline. If you insert keyboard commands in your MATLAB code, you can then use the commands.
You can use MATLAB's editor debug button to debug within MATLAB environment