"What I meant when I said I had 5 matfiles called m1 to m5 is that m1 - m5 were matfile-type variables obtained by calling the matfile function in MATLAB, i.e it allows us to index some of the variables in the entire dataset without loading it into memory. Is there any way to replicate what you did above in this case?"
If you had stored the matfile-type variables in one cell array then this would be trivial and easy using indexing.
But because you made the mistake of using lots of separate variables and numbering the variable names, the first thing we should do is to join them together into one cell array.
A = {m1,m2,m3,m4,m5};
for k = 1:numel(A)
m = A{k};
% do whatever with matfile m
end
Lets try it right now. First we create some fake data in MAT files:
X = 11; save test1 X
X = 22; save test2 X
X = 33; save test3 X
X = 44; save test4 X
X = 55; save test5 X
Then we can access the MAT files:
m1 = matfile('test1.mat');
m2 = matfile('test2.mat');
m3 = matfile('test3.mat');
m4 = matfile('test4.mat');
m5 = matfile('test5.mat');
A = {m1,m2,m3,m4,m5};
for k = 1:numel(A)
m = A{k};
m.X
end
But rather than creating lots of numbered variables (which should be avoided), you should just use a cell array in the first place.
