Help! Computer freeze results in empty text file!

Hi guys

This might at first glance appear as a non-matlab question, but bear with me. This IS a matlab question and it is fairly urgent.

I am working on a textfile in latex and due to a slight case of computer meltdown, the whole thing appears to be wiped clear of information after rebooting. Yet the file is still the right size and I can scroll through it just as if the information was still there (have tried several programs incl. textpad and notepad), so I was wondering if Matlab could be used to retrieve any of the information that has been lost? I have tried a variation of textscan, textread, fread, etc, with no luck so far.

ANY help is much appreciated!

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Difficult to say. You would want to fread() the file and look at the bytes that are there and see if there is anything useful.

[Jakob Sievers]

Its just a whole heap of zeros. I have had a few other people take a look at it using various programs and they all seem to agree that it is empty. Sigh... Thanks for giving your thoughts on it though!

[Image Analyst]

I've put in a feature request that the MATLAB editor have a hex mode, like my old favorite (now dead) code editor called Codewright. Such a feature would be useful here so you wouldn't have to write code to see the bytes. I hear SlickEdit has this capability. It sounds like the whole file has been overwritten with 0x00 or some other non-printable character (this would still let it have the same file size).