How can I detect how many instances of Matlab are currently running on my machine?

In task manager you can see how many matlab.exe there are.

is it possible to tell this from inside a matlab function?

eg I have a m function runing, doing stuff, and every so often I ask, "how many instances of matlab are running?" If the number is less than 2 say, then I am able to call a bat file from system.m to open a new instance and run a new job.

I dont have any fancy toolboxes eg parallel computing etc thanks

Answer 1

[Jason Ross]

You can call the "tasklist" (DOS) function with some arguments that will tell you how many are running on the system. You can then parse the return and get a count.

e.g.:

>> [status,result] = system('tasklist /FI "imagename eq matlab.exe" /fo table /nh')

status =

       0

result =

MATLAB.exe                    5132 Console                    1    359,184 K
MATLAB.exe                    6028 Console                    1    358,908 K

[mathworks2011]

wow. Jason. Thank you very much.

great answer!

[Jason Ross]

No problem, good luck with getting your processing going.

[Sanket Mishra]

Thanks Jason.