Unwanted global changes to MATLAB path

To the ITA developer team

Thanks for providing the ITA toolbox – it is very useful in our research.

However, we are having some serious issues on our shared lab computer with multiple logons. It seems that apart from creating a local pathdef, the ita_toolbox_setup also overwrites the shared pathdef.m (C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2020b\toolbox\local\pathdef.m) and this file is then owned by the user under which the ita_toolbox_setup was run. As a consequence, we have a broken MATLAB unless we log on as the same user that ran the toolbox setup. NTFS will only allow whoever ran the setup to access pathdef.m and other users can no longer start MATLAB.

Any 3rd party matlab toolbox should only affect the current MATLAB session under the current user and nothing further – by adding session specific paths temporarily. Have we done something wrong and is there a way to circumvent this problem?

We use MATLAB 2020b under Win10 and the ITA toolbox version is 7.