Too many outputs requested. Most likely cause is missing []

This is one of the weirdest error I saw in matlab.
"Too many outputs requested. Most likely cause is missing [] around left hand side that has a comma separated list expansion."
In my case, this was caused by the following sequence of operations:
I was extracting name from a dir object. The dir returned an empty output. This caused the query in the for loop to return void. Obviously, "too many outputs requested" from a zero size variable.