Is it possible to run bash scripts in the subsystem from MATLAB on Windows?

I am using MATLAB on Windows. I run much of my code on here, but I also have to work with some programmes that are only built for Linux. Hence, I have Ubuntu operating as a subsystem, and open a kernel to run these Linux programmes.

I have a pipeline of processing that I work through with the data I use, which essentially goes:

Windows MATLAB scripts > Linux bash commands > Windows MATLAB scripts

It would make things a lot more streamlined if I could have some MATLAB scripts that could perform the bash commands in the subsystem.

Is this even possible? I have only been able to find questions about this which refer to using MATLAB inside Linux, not working from outside and calling bash commands.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

[Swastik Sarkar]

Hi @David Haydock,

It appears that the goal is to run a MATLAB script on Windows, execute a bash script on Linux via WSL, and then return to MATLAB.

This can be achieved using MATLAB's system command, which allows the execution of OS-native commands directly from MATLAB. To run a bash script within WSL from MATLAB, the following command can be used:

system('wsl bash -c "./script.sh"');

For additional details on the system command, refer to the MATLAB documentation here:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/system.html

Hope this is helpful!