Adam Leadbetter

Very nice piece of code. It works very well for me.

Fantastic program. It does exactly what it says it does. Extremely easy to insert into a for loop and get an update on the progress through the for loop in real-time.

I just made a few changes:
1. The first time the program is run, the persistent variable 'lastCall' is empty, and so the "Percentage Complete" line displayed inside previous text I had printed to the workspace. So I just added a catch, which sets lastCall to -1 on the very first run, and that means the first time the function 'perccount' is run, the "Percentage Complete" line is displayed correctly.

2. I modified the last check (which checks whether the progress is complete) from
fprintf(1,'\n\n');
to
fprintf(1,'\b\b\b100%%\n\n');
This means the displayed line ends up showing "Percentage Complete: 100%" rather than "Percentage Complete: 99%", which is untrue - everything has completed properly!

3. A program without good commenting makes it very difficult to use and understand for other programmers. A description of the required variables used by the function at the start of the code helps a huge amount, and Adam, you did this very nicely! But if I want to understand how the program works, then it really helps to have some commenting through the code.

The code I am now running is:

function perccount(jj,maxjj)

%Reports the percentage of the job done to the screen.
%
% PERCOUNT(I,Imax)
% I is the current iteration between 1 and Imax
% Imax is the maximum number of iterations
%
% Do not print anything to the screen between calls of this function!
%

% title - s cmspike/perccount vr - 1.2
% author - bodc/alead date - 2006may16

% Updated 2009May14
% At suggestion of John D'Errico renamed internal variable "max" to
% "maxjj"
% Also following D'Errico's suggestions the following functionality has
% been added:
% 1. An invocation check - checks that two input arguments are
% supplied

% lastCall is the last integer percent displayed
persistent lastCall;
% if the number of arguments is 2
if(nargin == 2)
    % if this is the first run, make lastCall a value that will get the
    % following if loops working from the start.
    if isempty(lastCall)
        lastCall = -1;
    end
    % if the percentage has increased to the next integer, then the
    % displayed percentage will need to be updated
    if(lastCall ~= floor(((jj-1)/maxjj) * 100))
        % if the progress so far (jj out of maxjj) is not the first
        % representation, then backspace the percentage area to prepare for
        % the next percentage update.
        if(jj ~= 1)
            fprintf(1,'\b\b\b');
        % if the progress so far IS the first time it is displayed, then
        % display the "context line" of the percentage.
        else
            fprintf(1,'\n\tPercentage complete: ');
        end
        % Calculate the percentage done
        pc_done = num2str(floor(((jj-1)/maxjj) * 100));
        % if the percentage done so far is in the single digit range
        % (between 0 and 10), then add a zero before it so the percentage
        % displays neatly
        if(length(pc_done) == 1)
            pc_done(2) = pc_done(1);
            pc_done(1) = '0';
        end
        fprintf(1,'%s%%',pc_done);
    end
    
    lastCall = floor(((jj-1)/maxjj) * 100); % the last int percent displayed
    % if this is the last part of the total, then display 100% complete and
    % add a few lines of whitespace for neatness
    if(jj == maxjj)
        fprintf(1,'\b\b\b100%%\n\n');
    end
else
    error('Error: PERCCOUNT needs two input arguments...');
end

One final suggestion: Perhaps change the function to percentComplete.m, or percentDone.m, as this makes more sense than perccount.m, but that's entirely up to you!

Don't despair Ahmet, the inspired SSH From Matlab (updated) + SFTP, mentioned in the Acknowledgments, uses the forked Ganymed SSH-2 java library

Nicely done! Just what I needed.