Strange Environment Behavior Windows 10 and MATLAB

I had been using

 if strcmpi(getenv('userdomain'),'SPECIFIC_STRING')  

to identify which system was running on in a compiled app and all seemed fine.

The college machine was/is Win10 while personal was still Win7 -- just got new box for home as had hardware failure on older; this one is also Win10 Pro, but now the above returns an empty string.

The truly puzzling part is from MATLAB if I execute

>> !set
ALLUSERSPROFILE=C:\ProgramData 
...
PUBLIC=C:\Users\Public 
SESSIONNAME=Console 
SystemDrive=C: 
SystemRoot=C:\Windows 
TEMP=C:\Users\Duane\AppData\Local\Temp 
TMP=C:\Users\Duane\AppData\Local\Temp 
USERDOMAIN_ROAMINGPROFILE=DESKTOP-4R8AJAE 
USERPROFILE=C:\Users\Duane 
windir=C:\Windows 
>>

and, indeed, USERDOMAIN is apparently not set in the environment.

But, if I open CMD.EXE and type SET there, then the result is

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19042.685]
(c) 2020 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\Duane>set
ALLUSERSPROFILE=C:\ProgramData
...
PUBLIC=C:\Users\Public
SESSIONNAME=Console
SystemDrive=C:
SystemRoot=C:\Windows
TEMP=C:\Users\Duane\AppData\Local\Temp
TMP=C:\Users\Duane\AppData\Local\Temp
USERDOMAIN=DESKTOP-4R8AJAE
USERDOMAIN_ROAMINGPROFILE=DESKTOP-4R8AJAE
USERNAME=Duane
USERPROFILE=C:\Users\Duane
windir=C:\Windows

C:\Users\Duane>

then USERDOMAIN does, in fact, exst.

Can anybody explain why the behavior that while running inside MATLAB can't see the USERDOMAIN environment variable or better yet, how to have it be visible?

[Rik]

The only thing I can think of is that changes to the path are not visible in Matlab if they are made after starting Matlab. But I suspect you already tried turning it off and on again.

Since the system call implies to directly pass the call to the system CLI, this seems very odd. I know that on older versions of Matlab there are restrictions on interactivity, so there might be something going on there.

As a workaround for your particular use case, you could try if a batch file (writing the output to a text file in the tempdir) has access to the complete environment.

[Walter Roberson]

Right, experiment with

system('echo %userdomain%')

[dpb]

Thanks, guys.

I have no explanation; I had restarted Matlab quite a number of times since the install; this was the first time after had gotten files back for the compiled application and tried to update it for the new machine and ran into the problem.

Either "!" or Walter's system call returned same bizarre result -- I finally rebooted the entire system and the symptoms have now disappeared, at least temporarily.

Just yet another bizarre Windows anomaly, it seems...