2.5 Other Miscellaneous MATLAB Commands

In this section, some other useful MATLAB commands are discussed. For a full description, see the MATLAB help for the function.

• sort: As the name suggests, sort sorts the data in ascending order. -sort(-x) sorts the data in x in descending order.
• diary: Typing diary mine.txt at the MATLAB prompt creates a file called mine.txt containing all the information printed in the MATLAB command window from the time the command is entered. To turn off this feature, type diary off. (This can be useful when submitting assignments to show what was happened at the computer.)
• ones and zeros: These commands create vectors of ones and zeros of given size.
• eye: This command create an identity matrix of a given size, usually called I.
• size: This command returns the number of rows and the number of columns of a given matrix.
• ans: Issuing this command at the MATLAB prompt recalls the last answer that wasn't assigned to another variable name.
• ...: If the command line won't fit on one line, end the line with three dots. This tells MATLAB that the line that follows is a continuation of the previous line. For example, a large vector can be defined like this:

>> HPrices=[150000, 200000, 125000, 350000, 89000, 110000, ...
            110000, 150000, 120000, 100900, 93500, 97000, ...
            88000, 118500, 123300, 165000, 95000]';