matlab creates corrupt mat or eps files. No proper file locking

I'm using matlab to process the results of HPC simulations and typically I have several instances of matlab running going through simulation results and processing the to produce .mat files. Occasionally two instances of matlab may try to create the same .mat file at the same time. This usually results in a corrupt mat file and both programs failing. I can fix this by using save('foo.wxyz.mat','a'); unix('/bin/mv -f foo.wxyz.mat foo.mat'); where wxyz is a random string but this is rather a nuisance to do everywhere. I would propose that matlab automatically works this way so that it never overwrites files with corrupt files and use the atomic nature of mv The same problem holds for the print command and could be fixed similarly

Answer 1

[Adithya Addanki]

Hi Jim,

Thank you for bringing this to our notice. I have communicated this behavior to our development team. This may be considered for a future release of MATLAB.

Thank you, Adithya