Disable annoying message: "You are currently running MATLAB as root. Best practice is to run MATLAB only as root when elevated privileges are specifically required."

Hello MathWorks Community,

On Linux, MATLAB thinks it's running as root since it sees itself as being run by uid 0. Since it's running containerized, it's actually run by a different uid, making this a false alarm.

Being new to MATLAB, I couldn't find a way to turn this notifiation off. Since I will be using the product for quite a while, it would be annoying to have to close the notification after every startup.

If there is a way to suppress the message that I don't know about, please tell me how. Please refrain from giving me advice on how to set up my system differently. That is completely unnecessary and I'd rather close the messages every time than do that.

Thank you.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

In the calling script inside the container, use the Linux command seteuid https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/seteuid.2.html to set the effective uid to something non-zero; that should shut up the messages.

[Nils-Juan]

seteuid isn't a Linux command, it's a function you use in C programs (so not in container scripts). I guess I could write a wrapper using sudo -u and -g, but that is more of a hack. That's why my question was formulated in a way to ask for a more MATLAB-integrated way of doing this. I found that you can create startup scripts in startup.m, but I don't know if that can be used for my purpose.

[Walter Roberson]

True.

You could also chown the MATLAB executable, then chmod u+s

[Nils-Juan]

Yes but I don't want to go down the path of using a different UID with sudo -u or chmod +s because that kind of hack would require a different user being set up (and require permission changes on files I need to use), which I explicitly stated I do not want.

[Walter Roberson]

You will not be able to achieve the result you want using only steps that you are willing to take.

[Nils-Juan]

Ok sad