How to open a second instance of MATLAB in Mac OS X?

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to be able to have open a second instance of MATLAB on my Mac -- able to switch between them and have them be completely independent of each other. Is this possible?

I'm working on comparing two packages of code, and having one copy run one set, and another running the other set would be far advantageous than switching back and forth in a single instance of MATLAB.

Thanks for any advice!

[Nicholas]

You can right select on the Matlab icon in the dock and select "Open Additional Instance".

[Walter Roberson]

That only works from R2012a and onward.

Answer 1

[Kelly Kearney]

From a terminal window, run /Applications/MATLAB_R2010a.app/bin/matlab (or whatever the applicable location of the matlab shell script is). You can make an alias to this script if you want a quick startup alternative.

[Walter Roberson]

Does this work for MATLAB on OS-X ?

For another package I work with, it is not possible to open multiple instances of the application on OS-X, because OS-X instead just activates the existing instance (as a deliberate OS design choice.)

[Kelly Kearney]

The process of starting new instances on OS-X has varied over the last few releases. In older versions, the "Start Matlab" shortcut that appeared in the dock when launching the first instance of Matlab could be used to launch subsequent ones. The newer releases make things a little more complicated, so that the dock shortcut no longer has this behavior (it just activates the existing instance, as you say). Here's the tech note documenting my comment: http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-8G0VT7/?solution=1-8G0VT7

Answer 2

[Thorsten]

Right click on the icon (in the dock) of the Matlab hat is already running, select: "Open Additional Instance of Matlab". (Matlab R2015b, MacOS 10.11.6 "El Capitan")

[Walter Roberson]

That only works from R2012a and onward.

Answer 3

[Jason Stockmann]

I got around this by going into /MATLAB_2012b.app/bin using the Mac Finder, then right-clicking on the "matlab" Unix executable file and selecting "Make Alias". When I double click the alias I get a second instance of Matlab version 2012b and there don't appear to be any licensing issues.

I did this in Mac OSX 10.7.5 ("Lion").