Converting Structures to Matrices in Matlab

I use imfeature a lot (now regionprops). Since the output of imfeature(regionprops) is a structure I sometimes need to access the values of a feature for all blobs preferably in matrix form. I am not so sure if it can be done in one line but what I've discovered is a two step process.

Suppose a call to regionprops is made as follows:

stats = regionprops(L,'Area','MajorAxisLength','MinorAxisLength');

The first step is to convert the structure into a cell:
c = struct2cell(stats);

Then the cell is converted into a matrix:
m = cell2mat(c);

m now would have the same number of rows as features and columns would be as many as the number of blobs processed.

Composing a string and executing it in Matlab : preserving empty spaces

Say you want to automatically open files which are named file001, file002, etc. Further suppose that these files are in a folder named d:\folder 1, d:\folder 2, etc.
Normally, you could use strcat to concatenate a string together with num2str. For example
FILE = strcat('file00',num2str(i));
But strcat will eliminate empty spaces so if strcat is used this way,
FOLDER = strcat('folder ',num2str(3)); % note the single space after 'folder'
the result will be
FOLDER ='folder3'.
To preserve the empty space, use square brackets instead:
FOLDER = ['folder ',num2str(3)]
Suppose you composed a string containing a command:
com1 = 'cd c:\folder 3\file001.jpg'
To execute the string use exec:
exec(com1);