Looping on file wildcards in Octave

So I have written a function, showfile() for Octave 4.2.2 on Linux, which accepts a file name as its argument. And now I want to run it on all files in the current directory that match a certain pattern. How?

So first, obtain the list of files, and put it in a variable:

>> x=ls('myfiles*.dat');

This creates a matrix of chars, with each row containing the name of one file. The number of columns of this matrix is the length of longest file name, with the other rows padded with spaces (yes, ASCII 0x20).

So to call the function on all files:

>> for i=1:rows(x) ; showfile(strtrim(x(i,:))); end

The call to strtrim() removes the trailing spaces (those that were padded), so that the argument is the actual file name. If the real file name contains leading or trailing spaces, this won’t work (but who does that?). Spaces in the middle of the file name are OK, as strtrim() doesn’t touch them.