This question is old and the original poster has probably long since mved on, but I figured in case anyone else comes across this looking for the ability to access past commands from nodesktop mode (like I did a few days ago) they will actually have an answer.
NOTE: this is valid for MATLAB R2017b, but i cant find this functionality listed in any documentation, so idk if this will be the case in other version of MATLAB.
Basically, The "main" history is kept in
fullfile(prefdir,'History.xml')
It turns out that, when running in nodesktop mode, MATLAB keeps a 2nd history in
fullfile(prefdir,'history.m')
These histories are mutually exclusive: history.m ONLY records nodesktop mode commands, and History.xml only records commands made with the full desktop environment active.
I dont know of any builtin functions to access the nodesktop mode's history.m, but its easy to get previous commands using 'fopen' and 'fgetl'.
On the machine I use, both of these history files are located in
Personally, I use something like the following:
function [outStr] = getLastCommandStr
if usejava('desktop')
outStr = com.mathworks.mlservices.MLCommandHistoryServices.getSessionHistory;
outStr = char(outStr(end));
return
else
outStr = [''];
if exist(fullfile(prefdir,'history.m'),'file')
fid = fopen(fullfile(prefdir,'history.m'),'r');
hType = 1;
elseif exist(fullfile(prefdir,'History.xml'),'file')
fid = fopen(fullfile(prefdir,'History.xml'),'r');
hType = 2;
else
return
end
lineRecord = cell(5,1);
lineRecord{1} = fgetl(fid);
while ~feof(fid)
lineRecord = lineRecord([5,1:4]);
lineRecord{1} = fgetl(fid);
end
fclose(fid);
callerName = getCallerName;
if hType == 2
for nn = [1:numel(lineRecord)]
parseTest=regexprep(lineRecord{nn},['^<command .*>(.*',callerName,'.*)</command>$'],'$1');
if ~strcmp(lineRecord{nn},parseTest)
outStr = parseTest;
return
end
end
elseif hType == 1
for nn = [1:numel(lineRecord)]
if ~isempty(regexp(lineRecord{nn},['^.*',callerName,'.*$'],'once'))
outStr = lineRecord{nn};
return
end
end
end
end
end
function [callerFunc] = getCallerName(fullStackFlag)
d = dbstack;
if ~exist('fullStackFlag','var') || isempty(fullStackFlag) || ~(islogical(fullStackFlag) || isnumeric(fullStackFlag)) || fullStackFlag == 0
if numel(d) == 1
callerFunc = '';
elseif numel(d) == 2
callerFunc = 'base';
else
callerFunc = d(3).name;
end
else
callerFunc = cell(numel(d)-1,1);
[callerFunc{:}] = deal(d(2:end).name);
end
end
