In matlab, you can do all the UNIX commands.

There is an idea of the matlab workspace. As you define variables and formulas, they are stored, overwritten, expanded, deleted. But there is a state of the matlab environment at any point.

You may choose to leave matlab because of time pressure. You can store the state of matlab with a save command. Then quiot matlab, and leave. Later, after starting matlab, just enter load, and the file matlab.mat will be loaded, which restores the state of matlab to what it was when you did the save.