Why does MATLAB hang on startup when run in the background on HP machines?

Why does MATLAB hang on startup when run in the background on HP machines?

I can run MATLAB in batch mode on my HP machine, but if I try to run it in the background, it hangs on the splash screen:

 matlab -r "disp('test')" &

I have even tried starting MATLAB without the splash screen and without the Java Virtual Machine, but the startup still hangs.

The same problems occur on HP-UX 10.2 and HP-UX 11.0, using MATLAB 6.0, 6.1, and 6.5 (R12, R12.1, and R13).

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This hang occurs during the initializaion of the curses library provided by HP. It appears as if this is a bug in the HP operating system; therefore, our development staff has no plans to resolve this problem.

As a workaround, you can try using the following command to run in batch mode in the background.

 matlab /automation -r input.m > outputfile &

Note that this will only work if you redirect the ouput to a file that does not already exist. Therefore, it may be useful to put this code in a script that deletes the output file before redirecting output to it.