Running Matlab in the linux background using nohup

I have tried different suggested ways that I found in the internet to use nohup for matlab. It does not matter which computing system I use (local mac laptop/remote linux system/remote HPC system) and it does not matter what I write after:

nohup matlab ...

I always receive this error in the output file:

"nohup: matlab: No such file or directory"

while both matlab and nohup are accessible and work for other purposes.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

I suspect that in your shell, matlab is an alias rather than an executable file on your path.

For example on Mac, you would have to

nohup /Applications/MATLAB_R2023b.app/bin/matlab

unless /Applications/MATLAB_R2023b.app/bin is on your PATH

Note: cron and similar are initialized to have a fairly limited PATH; daemons and executables launched from the dock or by double-clicking do not go through login procedures and so files such as .zshrc are not executed when launching them.

[Neda]

Thank you so much Walter. I tried this:

nohup /Applications/MATLAB_R2023a.app/bin/matlab -nodisplay -nosplash -r "run path-to-directory/mycode.m; exit" > file.output 2>&1 &

The previous error did not show up, but I expected a text file to be created after running this code, but nothing came up. It seems matlab code was not executed. file.output is empty.

[Walter Roberson]

Example:

nohup /Applications/MATLAB_R2023b.app/bin/matlab -nodisplay -nosplash -r    "disp(date); exit" > /tmp/file.output  2>&1 < /dev/null &

The redirection of stdin was needed to prevent zsh from suspending the background job when it wanted to do output.

[Neda]

Great and thanks a lot! It works well in my local Mac computer!

But I also tried it in a remote Linux system, as it is different from my Mac. The only thing I know about the matlab location is: /usr/local/bin/matlab (there is no application like Mac). However, there is something that hinders running matlab using the command below:

nohup matlab -nodisplay -nosplash -r "run /path-to-directory/mycode.m; exit" > /tmp/file.output 2>&1 < /dev/null &

But nothing came out.

I really appreciate your time.

[Walter Roberson]

It has been several years since I last installed MATLAB on a Linux system, but that executable name does not look right -- not unless it is a symlink to the actual location.

The discussion at https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/20-how-do-i-make-a-desktop-launcher-for-matlab-in-linux gives several different potential executable names. For example,

nohup /usr/local/MATLAB_R2023a/bin/matlab -nodisplay -nosplash -r    "run /path-to-directory/mycode.m; exit" > /tmp/file.output  2>&1 < /dev/null &

You have to look inside the "bin" folder of the MATLAB installation directory in order to find the shell script that starts MATLAB.

[Neda]

Thank you so much.