Shutdown at specific time

Hi,

What is the best way to make Matlab shutdown at a specific time?

I am running a timer object, tmr, and want to exit matlab when that has completed execution.

tmr = timer                                 ...
    (   'Name'          , 'my_timer'        ...
    ,   'TimerFcn'      , @(~,~) my_script  ...
    ,   'BusyMode'      , 'drop'            ...
    ,   'ExecutionMode' , 'fixedDelay'      ...
    ,   'Period'        ,  10               ...
    ,   'TasksToExecute',  3               ...
    ,   'StartDelay'    ,  0                ...
    );
%--------------------------------------------------------------------------
fTime = datetime([year(x) month(x) day(x) 12 00 00]); % Firing time
startat(tmr,fTime)

And a script, my_script.m:

%%my_script
datestr(now,31)

Thank you,

IP

Answer 1

[Bora Eryilmaz]

Call exit in StopFcn of the Timer object.

[Inna Pelloso]

Thank you!

I just added:

 'StopFcn'       , 'exit'  

Answer 2

[Geoff Hayes]

@Inna Pelloso - if you know when (i.e. seconds from now) that you want to shut down MATLAB, then you could do something like

function exitMatlabWhenTimerExpires

    localTimer = timer('TimerFcn',@timerCallback,...
                       'StartDelay',30,'ExecutionMode','SingleShot');
    start(localTimer);
               
    function timerCallback(~,~)
        fprintf('Exiting MATLAB...\n');
        exit; 
    end

end

In the above, the timer callback is called 30 seconds (the StartDelay) after the timer is started.

[Inna Pelloso]

Thank you. Calling StopFcn is much easier.

Answer 3

[Adam Danz]

This solution displays a confirmation dialog that indicates to users that MATLAB will close unless they decide to cancel the auto-close. The clock in the message box counts down to 0 and if the user does nothing, MATLAB will close.

This uses quit force which ignores the finish.m file and it ignores the exit confirmation prompt if it is enabled. If you want don't want to ignore those, just use quit.

tmr = timer                                 ...
    (   'Name'          , 'my_timer'        ...
    ,   'TimerFcn'      , @autoCloseMATLABfcn  ...
    ,   'BusyMode'      , 'drop'            ...
    ,   'StartDelay'    ,  0                ...
    );
fTime = datetime([year(x) month(x) day(x) 12 00 00]); 
startat(tmr,fTime)

% For testing, replace the fTime line with
%    fTime = datetime('now') + seconds(3);  % prompt in 3 seconds


function autoCloseMATLABfcn(tobj,~)
delay = 30; % seconds 
msgboxFcn = @(d)sprintf('Exiting MATLAB in %d seconds. Do you want to cancel auto-exit? ', d);
mb = msgbox(msgboxFcn(delay),'Exiting','warn');
starttime = tic;
while isvalid(mb) && toc(starttime)<delay
    % keep waiting unless msgbox closes or time expires
    timeleft = floor(delay - toc(starttime));  
    set(findobj(mb,'type','text','Tag','MessageBox'), 'String', msgboxFcn(timeleft)) % update text
    drawnow % update the msgbox display
end
stop(tobj)
delete(tobj)
if isvalid(mb)
    close(mb)
    quit force  % "force" ignores the finish.m file and exit confirmation 
end
end

[Inna Pelloso]

Thank you again. I'm firing Matlab siliently from a crontab (Linux)...so don't want any confirmation dialogs.