Changing the shell for system commands to mingw-w64

Hi community,

I've been trying to use 'system' commands in MATLAB to execute operating system command (from MRtrix3 to be specific). However, to do so I need to change the shell from default to mingw-w64 for my windows laptop, which I've been struggling to do. While I've tryied things like:

setenv MATLAB_SHELL C:\msys2\mingw64.exe

inside my script before calling system comamnds, it doesn't actually work.

I wonder what can I do about this / what i did wrong.

Many thanks in advance

[dpb]

I've not tried to renew that quest for a number of years but I reached the conclusion MATLAB / MW simply refuse to acknowledge there is any other possible shell and simply dispatches CMD.EXE regardless.

Even setting a default user shell at the SYS level didn't make any difference in earlier releases and on pre-Win10 OS'es; I doubt any enlightenment has since changed anything.

I just gave it up as a lost cause despite the loss of functionality and hadn't even tried with Win10.

I suspect it will become even more interesting when folks begin wondering why PowerShell isn't spawned... :)

[Walter Roberson]

Using the SHELL environment variable is only supported on MacOS and Linux

[dpb]

Is that documented anywhere, Walter? And what makes them special?

[Walter Roberson]

Bottom of the system() page discusses MATLAB_SHELL and SHELL environment variables in the Unix section.

Answer 1

[Shivam]

Hi, you can override an environment variable in the system command by modifying the command string. In your case, you want to set the MATLAB_SHELL variable to the path of the MinGW-w64 shell before executing your command.

Here's an example of how you can modify your system command to set the MATLAB_SHELL variable:

myPath = 'C:\msys2\mingw64.exe';  % Path to the MinGW-w64 shell
dosCommand = 'pacman -Su'; % For example 
system(['set MATLAB_SHELL=' myPath ' && ' dosCommand])

[Jeremy Hughes]

MATLAB_SHELL only has an effect on unix platforms. Windows only supports CMD

Answer 2

[Jeremy Hughes]

On Windows, the only way to do this is to launch the desired shell with the command as an argument.

I couldn't (quickly) find the argumnents for mingw64 how to do this, but for powershell this would look like:

dosCommand = "dir"; % Dos Command needs to be escaped correctly to pass quotes if needed. 
wrappedCommand = sprintf('powershell --command "%s"',dosCommand)

wrappedCommand = 'powershell --command "dir"'

system(wrappedCommand)