Jesse Hopkins

Thanks for this useful tool! One quick note, around line 205 you use exist(..,'file') and exist(..,'dir'). I've found these to be problematic, as exist will return true if it finds the input anywhere on the matlab path.

This actually did cause an error in my case, when I passed in a directory called "Workspace". The directory had been deleted, however exist('Workspace','file') returns true due to workspace.m in the matlab install directory. The subsequent call do dir returned an empty matrix, causing an assignment error.

I've found the following functions more reliable for performing isdir/isfile type operations:
function x = myisdir(str)
x = false;
tmp = dir(str);
if length(tmp) > 1 % if str is a dir, then tmp will always contain at least '.' and '..'
x = true;
end

function x = isfile(str)
x = false;
tmp = dir(str);

if ~isempty(tmp) && length(tmp) == 1
if ~tmp.isdir
x = true;
end
end

Hamid, glad you found this useful. Java is used to implement the compression, you can see this pretty clearly in the "compress" method. I haven't tried it, but I think it will work change the line "g = java.util.zip.GZIPOutputStream(f)" to "g = java.util.zip.ZipOutputStream(f)".

Looks like my comment didn't come through on the last rating. This has been a very useful toolbox, but we are having a minor cosmetic issue with VBoxFlex. It seems that about 50% of the time, moving across a flex boundary from right-to-left will cause the pointer to get stuck in the "resize" icon. If I move very slowly across the boundary (right-to-left), then 100% of the time the pointer will get stuck in the "resize" icon, but if I move very quickly across the boundary then it doesn't seem to get stuck in the resize icon. Note that the pointer icon does go back to the normal icon after I leave the layout, or move across the boundary again left-to-right. Any thoughts?

Thanks for sharing this.
Is there a way I can compress/decompress using ZIP format (as opposed to GZIP)?

Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried it with my version (which chunks the data in 5 MiB blocks to prevent running out of heap space), but the speed-up is not measurable. Compressing ~120 MiB takes 0.035 seconds for the custom typecast and 0.161 for the built-in function. In contrast, the java GZIP function takes 7 seconds (and uses only 1 thread).

However, sharing pointers is of course a much nicer solution.