[FIX] run_matlab_cmd now working with MATLAB on Linux

[mmbannert]

Hi Matthias,

I tried to run your demo code but the MATLAB call failed in mit.py at lines 119-125, saying that it couldn't find extract_all_fixations:

print('Running original code to extract fixations. This can take some minutes.')
print('Warning: In the IPython Notebook, the output is shown on the console instead of the notebook.')
with open(os.path.join(temp_dir, 'extract_all_fixations.m'), 'w') as f:
    for cmd in cmds:
        f.write('{}\n'.format(cmd))

run_matlab_cmd('extract_all_fixations;', cwd=temp_dir)

The problem is that, when running MATLAB on Linux, the cwd argument often has no effect when running the MATLAB command via subprocess.check_call in utils.py. This is because the startup folder of MATLAB on Linux is not always the directory from which you start it (see here for more information). So what most likely happened was that it started MATLAB from the temporary folder but it then used a different folder as a startup folder. And that folder did not contain the extract_all_fixations.m file.

I modified run_matlab_cmd so that MATLAB first cd's into the directory that contains the m file and then executes the desired function. The demo code now runs as expected.

Cheers,
Michael