Know the parent function

Question

I'm wondering if there is a way to know by what function is called my function "fun_a" when running fun_a. I know that i could track the "parent function" by sending information as an argument to the "child function" but i would like to avoid that if possible.

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

One way is using dbstack:

% In a sub-function or function called by another
st = dbstack;
st(1).name % The function's name
st(2).name % The function caller's name (parent)
...

Another useful function is mfilename if you happen to just want the name of the main function and M-file in which a sub-function resides.

No idea what the computational cost of these are, but I imagine that simply passing in the function name is going to be cheaper even if less elegant.