Matlab in Terminal: Nodesktop Vs Nojvm

There are two choices to use Matlab in terminal or console (under Unix and Linux-based OS), with option -nodesktop or -nojvm. The following two pictures are the similar of Matlab running in terminal with those different options/arguments.

Matlab with nodesktop

Matlab with nojvm

What's the difference?

So, what's the different?  It looks same from the terminal, but with nojvm we cannot do anything which needs java like figure/plot, animation, help and other but with nodesktop we can still do plot, figure, edit and other. When we command plot or figure , matlab with -nojvm will give the following error,

Error using figure
This functionality is no longer supported under the -nojvm startup option. For
more information, see "Changes to -nojvm Startup Option" in the MATLAB Release
Notes. To view the release note in your system browser, run
web('http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/release-notes.html#btsurqv-6',
'-browser').

So, if you want to make computation with no figure, it is better to use matlab with -nojvm, but if you want to make plot just use matlab with -nodesktop. Using matlab with -nojvm will save approximateley 400 MB of RAM. However, using Matlab with -nodesktop does not save any substantial memory.

Running code inside Unix shell

While using matlabin Unix-based OS like Ubuntu or Fedora, you can directly pass the m-code to Matlab via terminal as follows,

$ matlab -nodesktop -nodisplay -r filename 

It is equivalent to GNU Octave as,

$ octave -q --eval filename 

Let's try!