How can I abort a extensive loop after a given amount of time in MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a)?

I have a large FOR loop in my code that should be aborted after a certain amount of time has elapsed.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This can be done by including a conditional IF statement in the loop that needs to be aborted after a certain time of computation has been exeeded. The example below uses the CLOCK and ETIME functions to compute the time and abort the loop with BREAK and END statements.

% Example - terminate loop after 60 seconds

t1=clock;

for i = 1:n

          if (etime(clock,t1)>60), break, end

                  %do somthing

end

You could also work with RETURN or ERROR functions instead of the BREAK statement.