Brett's Pick this week is "FDEP: a pedestrian function dependencies finder," by Us.

Back in September, 2009, I featured a file called exportToZip that facilitates easy creation of Zip files. I'm still a fan of Malcolm's submission; I use it frequently.

Today's Pick facilitates the same functionality, plus more. FDEP "dissects [MATLAB] files and iteratively looks for all user-defined functions used during runtime." With a simple syntax:

fd = fdep('MorphTool.m')

you get a structure that shows a wealth of useful information. If you really want to dig in and detect all file dependencies for you MATLAB function, function DEPFUN does a pretty good job--but can be very slow. Us's file is a wrapper around DEPFUN, but "due to an efficient pruning engine," it can be much faster.

Output from depfun is a structure that includes information about Toolbox dependencies, function calls, help, subfunctions, and more. To create a complete zip file, for example, one could say simply:

zip('myZip',fd.fun);

Us's code is, as usual, difficult (for me, at least) to read, but superbly implemented and robust--I've learned to trust it over the years.

As always, comments to this blog post are welcome. Or leave a comment for Us here.

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Published with MATLAB® 7.13