Back to Work with a Push and a Pop

Posted by Jiro Doke, December 4, 2009

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Jiro's pick this week is pushd & popd by Peter Bodin.

Navigating through folders is a big part of my MATLAB workflow, especially because I may be working on multiple demos/projects at any one time. When I change folders, invariably I may want to come back to where I was.

Example
In Addition...
Interactive Alternative
Comments

Example

Here's an example illustrating my workflow. I'll use pushd and popd to help me do this.

I'm currently working on this blog post. I am located here:

pwd

ans =
C:\MyStuff\Work\NoCopy\Blog\POTW\PushPop

I just got a call from Bob and Brett saying that they need an updated version of the GUI Building demo ASAP. Time to switch folders!

% works like CD
pushd C:\MyStuff\Work\Demos2009b\GUIBuilding
pwd

ans =
C:\MyStuff\Work\Demos2009b\GUIBuilding

I realize that I am missing a couple of key files for this demo. Well, that's understandable. I haven't ported over the files from my master version. I'm not quite sure which files I need, so let me go check.

pushd ..\..\Demos_public\GUIBuilding
pwd

ans =
C:\MyStuff\Work\Demos_public\GUIBuilding

I find out that I need two files: "myFilter.m" and "myPSD.m". Let me capture this folder name.

copyFromFolder = pwd;

I go back to my R2009b demos folder and copy over the two files.

popd
pwd
copyfile(fullfile(copyFromFolder, 'myFilter.m'));
copyfile(fullfile(copyFromFolder, 'myPSD.m'));

ans =
C:\MyStuff\Work\Demos2009b\GUIBuilding

Now, I can zip this up and email it to Bob and Brett.

zip('GUIDemo.zip', ...
  {'filteringGUI.fig', 'filteringGUI.m', ...
  'myFilter.m', 'myPSD.m', 'myImportfile.m'});

% I'm commenting this part out so that it won't keep sending email to my
% buddies every time I publish this script.
%
%   sendmail({'Robert.Bemis@mathworks.com', 'Brett.Shoelson@mathworks.com'}, ...
%     'GUI Building Demo', 'Hi Bob and Brett, here it is!', 'GUIDemo.zip');

Now, I'm ready to get back to my blog post! Ta-dah!

popd
pwd

ans =
C:\MyStuff\Work\NoCopy\Blog\POTW\PushPop

In Addition...

Another nice feature of pushd is that you can pass in any file that is on the MATLAB path, and it will go to that directory. For example, I know that there is an AVI called "rhinos.avi", which is one of the demo files from the Image Processing Toolbox. I want to see the other demo files from that toolbox.

pushd rhinos.avi
pwd

% go back
popd

ans =
C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2009b\toolbox\images\imdemos

Interactive Alternative

If you'd rather click your way through, we have that built-in to the Current Folder Browser.

Notice the Back and Forward buttons to "pop" back to where you were. Ken and Mike blogged about it here.

Comments

These types of tools help users in the development phase. They may never show up in the end product, but since MATLAB is a development platform, these functions could drastically improve the MATLAB experience. Let me know of other File Exchange entries that fall into this category. I can already think of a couple.

Published with MATLAB® 7.9