Matlab saves copies of files with extension m~. What do they do & can I turn them off?

Matlab keeps saving a copy of my m-files with the extension m~ in the same directory. This is pretty annoying since I always click on them and have to close them down. I am guessing it is some safety feature or some cach开发者_JAVA技巧ing but is there anyway to turn them of so that they at least don't show up in the Matlab file browser box or act as hidden files or something?

These are autosave files. You can modify autosaving in File->Preferences->Editor/Debugger->Autosave.

I wouldn't turn off the feature (it has come in very handy before), but I agree that having lots of .m~ files in the working directory is annoying. I usually set this to changing the extension to .asv, and to saving all autosaves in a single autosave directory.