Conventional / "best practices" location for personal functions

Is there a conventional / standard / "best practices" location for parking self-developed functions, such that they are globally available from the command prompt (i.e. independent of current working directory)? I initially thought about $MATLABROOT/toolbox/local, but that contains exclusively TMW-provided scripts and text files. Moreover, as explained by John D'Errico in this old thread, there are potential issues with path caching at startup for anything placed inside $MATLABROOT.

(To be clear, I'm interested in where, rather than how. Either path or pathtool can be used to do the latter.)

[dpb]

I have a WORK directory for current transient day-to-day stuff and dedicated subdirectories for specific projects.

The general things that are useful everywhere are in \UTILS which I put at the head of the MATLABPATH.

[AMM]

The latter is what I had in mind. Usually this happens when I write something for a specific task that turns out to be more broadly useful. Thanks.

[dpb]

Precisely.

Like many newbies, once upon a time I would do things like customize a builtin function or add a routine in a distribution location -- didn't take but a couple of times of having to recreate the environment after a new release to realize the advice to not do that was wise...

[Stephen23]

@AMM: you should not add/remove/edit files within any application's installation directories. This is not just because of function caching issues (i.e. something specific to MATLAB), but because it is inherently a bad idea to alter anything in the installation directory of any application, even in locations that you think are benign, e.g. MATLAB's toolboxes.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/311486-what-should-i-do-if-i-got-this-message

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/281579-how-can-i-solve-this-message-the-current-directory-d-matlap2015-bin-is-reserved-for-matlab-files?s_tid=answers_rc1-1_p1_MLT

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/385963-problem-of-imwrite-permission

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/337021-new-to-matlab-here-is-the-assignment

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/222839-how-to-use-functions-from-private-directories

There be dragons!

[AMM]

dbp, Stephen—thanks both.

I accepted the one from Image Analyst because that was the only one I could (everything else here is posted as a comment), but the consensus among you is pretty clear. Cheers. -AMM

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

I do just like dpb says. The Mathworks told me to have a work folder, and all my various 200+ projects have subfolders under work. In addition, I have one folder there called Utilities that has a bunch of useful functions that I use all the time in other programs. I set a path to it in my startup.m file.

[AMM]

Makes sense. Thanks!