dos/system error

I am trying to run an EXE from the MATLAB (r2010b on Windows XP) command prompt, and am not able to do so.

I can easily use

dos('dir');

and list the contents of the directory, but running my EXE like:

dos('segment 0.8 100 100 tmpim1269868.ppm tmpimsp1269868.ppm');

does not work. The command prompt is available to me almost instantaneously, and the ans variable contains the value -1.0737e+9.

I am able to run the EXE from a DOS prompt with the exact same command, and generate the correct result, but when the DOS prompt is called from MATLAB, it just doesn't seem to be working. I have tried creating a BAT file containing the execution call in the directory and running the same by using the dos command, but to no avail.

The same occurs when I use system instead of dos.

Any advice at all would be appreciated.

Answer 1

[Dustin]

OK, I think I missed the most obvious thing. I just restarted MATLAB and everything is hunky-dory. Code's running absolutely fine now.

Answer 2

[Jan]

Do you catch the 2 output arguments from the DOS command? ANS should be 0 for successful processing, and not 0 otherwise. Try:

[a, b] = system(['segment 0.8 100 100 ', ...
                 'tmpim1269868.ppm tmpimsp1269868.ppm']);

Are you sure that "segment.exe" and the picture(s) is(are) available in the current folder? Does an error message appear in the output [b]?

[Dustin]

Hi Jan,

Thanks for your reply.

I tried this and a is -1.0737e+9, while b is ''. So no new information available.

Yes, the EXE and the image are available in the folder. If the image is not available, the program outputs "loading input image" and exits. I do not get any output at all from the program though, so I am finding it really difficult to find out what's going wrong.