Pausing scripts to wait for user to execute commands

Is there a way to pause a MATLAB script and wait for a user to execute some commands (e.g. brushing in the plot and then in the command window)?

Specifically, I want to select some data using the brush tool from the plot, but I want to select multiple groups and then deal with them later (i.e. with the remainder of my script). Typically, I could just do this in 2 parts, one to get the plot, and then after I brush the data and manipulate it into the right structure, run a secondary script to finish up. However, my issue is that I need to do this for a number of different datasets which I was looping through. Changing the parameters to get to the next dataset manually in addition to selecting the data manually seems too tedious for there not to be a better way.

I'm familiar with

pause

and things such as

x = input('Enter something: ')

But this only pauses the script, rather than suspending it to allow the user to interact with the data freely. I think I can brush data and save as variables during a pause, and if I was always going to brush the same number of variables, then this would be fine, but I will select groups based on how the data looks. And because they will be different sizes, I would then save the data in a cell to manipulate in further parts.

I could see such functionality also being useful later if I want to explore the data in the future. See a plot and then want to do something more to it.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

keyboard() -- but you have to know to dbcont to continue afterwards.

[Jeremy Young]

Thanks, I had a feeling it had something to do with debugging. I didn't think having to insert a break point everytime would be the best solution, and that there must have existed a programatic way to do so.