History file often broken in MATLAB 2014a

Every third (estimated) MATLAB start I get the error message "There was a problem reading your command history."

There was nothing remarkable in the MATLAB session before (no crashes..)

System: i7, 16 GB RAM, gentoo Linux Kernel 3.16.1 64 Bit, MATLAB 2014a

What can cause this error so often?

[Image Analyst]

I get it on Windows 7 also. Not sure what causes it.

[Image Analyst]

Just got it again. Sometimes I see it on startup but most of the time I don't see it. I have no idea why. Luckily I rarely need history from any day before the current day.

[Riccardo Spica]

It happens to me too and quite often. I am on ubuntu 12.04. No idea what may be the cause but it is annoying. When I "accept history as is" this message appears on the command window: "Unable to parse command history line: >"

[David Chambers]

I'm also getting this same problem on a Win7 machine. I've had 2014a since July 2014 and this problem just began this week (end of Oct 2014).

[Joe Bova]

I too have seen this a couple of times. When I saw it this AM I looked in the Windows event log and noticed a disk controller error and some delayed write fail entries (occurred when I un-docked my laptop) which very much could cause the issue. The workaround from an application perspective might be that MATLAB flushes the command history to disk immediately and close the file handle but that would invoke a performance penalty.

[Jason]

I had the same problem and tried fixing it this morning by removing (backing up by renaming) the "History.xml" in the directory given by prefdir and restarting. MATLAB created a new "History.xml" file which it seems to parse without any problems. I tried opening and closing MATLAB and running a few function in between. So far no further problems. We'll see if any issues come up in the future.

[Al]

did you ever find a solution to this?

[Jonas]

No, I still have no solution. But I hope it is fixed in 2014b or at least in 2015a. I can not imagine, how a simple textfile can get broken (so often).

[juan]

Here is the link where i found the solution http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/169697-why-unable-to-parse-command-history-line-error