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?

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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.