Want to define a cell vector according to the files in a directory

I want to define a variable (say "files") as a cell array containing the names of the folders in a specific directory. Consider the directory of interest (home/directory) that contains 4 folders named 'AAAA' 'BBB' 'CC' 'D'. The following command yields the following result:

files=ls('/home/directory');

files=AAAABBBCCD

I want files to be a cell array containing 4 elements

files(1) = AAAA

files(2) = BBB

files(3) = CC

files(4) = D

Any ideas? Thanks

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

dinfo = dir('/home/directory');
files = {dinfo.name};

Note that the directory will not be included as part of what is stored in files

Do not use ls() for this purpose: On OS-X and Linux it invokes the shell ls command, which produces multiple columns per line, space separated, with embedded newline characters. You might be tempted to use that and then to split at whitespace, but if you do that then you will accidentally file names that contain whitespace in them. The dir() that I show will not have problems this way.

[ZigzS]

Thank you! Worked great. I run Ubuntu for the record.