kill all the open figures in matlab

The following function can be used to kill all the open figures in Matlab

function kill_figures
  % close all open figures
  delete(findall(0,'Type','figure'));
end

This function comes in handy when doing parametric studies. Say, there is a big chunk of code that generates 10 figures per run. In order to study the effect of a parameter for say 5 cases, we end up generating 50 (=5x10) plots. Once the study is done, this function comes in handy to kill all those figure windows.

Related tips:

To get the handles of all the figures, do

figHandles = findall(0, 'Type', 'figure');