clear

A safety net for MATLAB's clear command

So you do something in an interactive Unix Shell and type 'clear' to get rid of some annoying ouput. Then you switch to MATLAB, do the same and lose all your current work. Syntax madness... o_O

It feels fundamentally wrong that MATLAB's clear() assumes that 'no input' == 'everything'. This function is the workaround, effective only for interactive calls. I would like to apply this to script calls, too, but this breaks a lot of matlab's own code.

This function intercepts all calls of clear() (hence the name...) and decides what to do based on the given arguments and whether it was called from the command window or not.

in pseudo code:

IF  < NO ARGUMENT, I.E. CLEAR EVERYTHING >

      IF  < IS INTERACTIVE >

          < ASK USER EXPLICITLY IF THEY WANT TO ERASE EVERYTHING >

          IF  < NO, THEY DON'T >   % <-- safety net
              RETURN
          END
      END
END

 <DEFAULT CLEAR CODE>

Note: 'clear all' or 'clear variables' will still clear everything immediately, because it was specifically asked to do so!

This relies on undocumented MATLAB/JAVA code to get the last command from the history. If the command fails (maybe very old or very new MATLAB), this is caught by try/catch and clear behaves completely like the builtin function. So, don't rely on it, just have it as a safety net!

Usage

  Save this m-file anywhere in your matlab path such that it has
  precedence over the builtin implementation. That is, make sure
  that
      >> which clear
  returns the path to this file.

This is Filexchange #50092

VolMi/matlab-clear

clear

Usage