I'm trying to automate mac terminal calls in MATLAB. In my specific use case I used brew to install cmake but in MATLAB cmake isn't recognized [~,result] = system('cmake ..'); returns zsh:1: command not found: cmake

Using the following I am pretty sure I could update the path so that cmake is recognized. (Mac,Matlab,bash) Changing the PATH of bash in Matlab for system commands

However, I was wondering if there was a generic way of mimicking the path that the terminal is seeing.

In particular when I run env in the terminal and in MATLAB using [~,result] = system('env'); the path variables are different and I'm wondering why that is and how to ensure they align.

CodePudding user response：

When you start MATLAB from its icon on macOS, you never ran the login shell startup files, so most of your configuration is not loaded. That is, anything configured in ~/.zprofile, ~/.zshrc, etc. is not seen by MATLAB. Unlike other Unixes, macOS doesn’t start a login shell when you log on. See here for the differences between a login shell and a non-login shell.

One way around this is to launch MATLAB from a terminal window. Another way is to manually load the zsh configuration before running your shell command.

A cleaner solution is to avoid ~/.zprofile (loaded for login shells) and ~/.zshrc (loaded for interactive shells), and instead put your configuration in ~/.zshenv (loaded for all shells, including the one started by MATLAB for system() or !).

In particular, Homebrew adds a line

eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

to your ~/.zprofile file. Moving this line to ~/.zshenv and restarting MATLAB should add the Homebrew configuration to shells started from within MATLAB.