How to force Matlab to read files in a folder serially?

Question

I have files in a folder that are numbered from writer_1 to writer_20. I wrote a code to read all the files and store them in cells. But the problem is

Answer 1

Stealing a bit from DavidS and with the assumption that your folders all are of the form "writer_XX" with XX being digits.

folders = dir([pwd '\temp']);
folders(ismember( {folders.name}, {'.', '..'}) ) = [];

% extract numbers from cell array
foldersNumCell = regexp({folders.name}, '\d*', 'match');

% convert from cell array of strings to double
foldersNumber = str2double(foldersNumCell);

% get sort order
[garbage,sortI] = sort(foldersNumber);

% rearrange the structure
folders = folders(sortI);

The advantage of this is that it avoids a for loop. In reality it only makes a difference though if you have tens of thousands for folders. (I created 50,000 folders labeled 'writer_1' to 'writer_50000'. The difference in execution time was about 1.2 seconds.