Daniel

Vanessa,
Sorry to disappoint, but I think you're probably more or less right. The situation in which I thought the function would be useful turned out to be entirely avoidable, after much TLC to the script in question (wading through someone else's lazy coding).
Actually I wrote the function after I'd already realised it wasn't needed, I was just curious to see how it could be done neatly and reckoned there may occasionally be a need for it.

For ND-array tiedranks you might like http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/34560-tiedrankxdim

I haven't actually tried this yet, but how about using the 'sparse' parameter in accumarray? And why not add a 'dim' parameter to your function...I think it's still possible to do this with accumarray.

I recommend not to overwrite the automatically accessed "ans" variable. This can be confusing e.g. during debugging. I'd use something like "dummy" instead.

The function is useful to support Matlab versions <= 2009a. The help text does niot have a H1-line, but is clear and contains the required warning. Perhaps a dialog might be added to ask for a confirmation. I cannot test the robustness of the REGEXP currently, such that I do not dare to rate this submission yet.

Btw. the need to include a subfunction to obtain a recursive list of files in subfolders is shows, that TMW should urgently include this as a toolbox function. This is a standard task which should not be left to the users.

Vanessa,
Sorry to disappoint, but I think you're probably more or less right. The situation in which I thought the function would be useful turned out to be entirely avoidable, after much TLC to the script in question (wading through someone else's lazy coding).
Actually I wrote the function after I'd already realised it wasn't needed, I was just curious to see how it could be done neatly and reckoned there may occasionally be a need for it.