Why do the LS and ! (bang) commands not work in MATLAB 7.7 (R2008b) when the $MATLAB_SHELL environment variable is set?

I have the environment variable $MATLAB_ROOT set to 'bash', and when I try to run the LS command in MATLAB I get the following error message.

 ??? Error using ==> ls at 38

Similarly, shelling out commands with the bang operator (!) do not work.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

If you would like to set the $MATLAB_SHELL then it must be set with an absolute path. For instance if, outside of MATLAB, you get the following result:

 > which bash

 /bin/bash

Then $MATLAB_SHELL should be set to /bin/bash, not simply bash.