Al Feiveson ([email protected]) asked about variables
sometimes disappearing from a colleagues dataset:
> Hi - A colleague of mine recently installed Stata 10 for WIndows on his
> PC. He wanted to run this do-file that I had written. But seemly at
> random, when -save, replace- commands were executed, sometimes a
> variable in the data file (not always the same one) was mysteriously
> dropped. The same do-file works perfectly well on my machine (both are
> PC's running Windows XP). I cannot get this error to happen on mine. As
> an example, a section of the code contains something like
>
> use mdata
> (has 10 variables, including blah)
> replace blah = xxx
> save,replace
> (now it only has 9 variables)
>
> [One of the variables in mdata mysteriously disappeared.]
>
> This does not always happen, nor is the same variable always deleted.
> Has anyone heard of this happening and/or does anyone know why?
>
> We tried updating STata 10 (today), that did not help.
Al's colleague should contact Stata Technical Services at
[email protected] and include as much information about his
installation as possible (including the output of the -about- command)
so that they can help him resolve it. We have not seen such a problem
in an official Stata installation. The only time we have ever seen a
problem like this has been with certain corrupt or modified
executables or licenses which are sometimes available from unofficial
sources on the internet, so a good first step at resolving the issue
would be to make sure to uninstall whatever has been installed and
then to install from scratch from an official Stata CD and license
to make sure everything is in a clean initial state.
--Alan Riley
([email protected])
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