1. running Matlab .m script in terminal without showing desktop (for batch running).
know where the Matlab is installed. For example in my Mac the Matlab is installed in
/Applications/MATLAB_R2012b.app/bin
call Matlab from anywhere that stores the script (test_script.m) you want to run
/Applications/MATLAB_R2012b.app/bin/matlab -nodesktop -nojvm -nosplash -r "test_script(arguments)"
2. compile Matlab .m scripts to executables.
in Matlab GUI use Apps -> Matlab complier
in terminal use mcc -m test_script.m to generate an executable file (test_script) and a shell script (run_test_script.sh) which is used to run the executable.
Then in terminal:
./run_test_script.sh /PATH/TO/MATLAB/ arguments
Note that the arguments will be passed to Matlab as strings. That means if they are numbers you need to add str2num in the code to convert them from strings to the numbers.