Does selecting/opening files work differently on different operating systems?

The author of a Matlab .m file gave me a copy of it to try out. After it's launched, one of the first steps in using the app is to select a .txt file to open and process.

The author wrote it in Matlab on a Windows 10 system. When I run it in Matlab R2019b in macOS 10.15.7, selecting and opening the .txt file doesn't work as expected. The steps are:

-- Click on an "Open" button in the Matlab app's window

-- When a file directory pane appears, change the selection parameters from "All MATLAB files" to "All Files *.*"

-- Select the .txt file and proceed

The problem I'm having is that, after I change the selection parameters to "All Files" as noted above, the .txt file remains grayed out and cannot be selected.

So I'm trying to eliminate possible causes. Does this sound like something that could behave differently in Windows and Mac systems? I thought Matlab was pretty OS-blind. Or are there any other suggestions for possible solutions?

[Nikhil Sonavane]

Hi Frank,

This is a known issue and we are trying to fix this up. I have conveyed this to the concerned team again and they would look into it again

[Frank O'Donnell]

Thanks, good to know. For now I have a workaround that's a bit of a kludge. When I save the data file from a non-Matlab program, I add an .m to the end of the filename (i.e. datafile.txt.m). Actually it's just data, not Matlab code, but this allows it to be opened in the file selection dialog. The Matlab app can then process it normally.

[Graham Rowlands]

Still not fixed on macOS with R2021a...

[Andrew Engell]

I am having this issue as well. Editor will open the file if the command is written out in the command window (e.g., edit file.txt), but the file cannot be opend from the file dialog. It'd be great to get an update seeing as the issue has not been addressed in a year.