st: Re: guaranteed to be present

[baum <baum@bc.edu>]

--On Thursday, February 13, 2003 2:33 -0500 Nick wrote:

> ... "guaranteed to be present" was the sting, which
> is a distance away from "available in principle".
Well, following the Cox principle of only working in 8-space, my copy of 
Mac OS X (which is the only relevant Mac OS for Stata 8 users) responds to 
'which gzip' with '/usr/bin/gzip'. So every Mac OS X user will have it 
available. I don't know about WinXP. But if Mac OS X users want to use 
gzip, they have it readily available. (In reality, the Stuffit Expander app 
provided with OS X will also do ungzipping, but will not create a .gz file).

But I agree--there is no need for this to be a Stata command, given the 
idiosyncratic nature in which gzipped (or other compressed-format files) 
might be used in a program. As long as we can invoke system commands from 
within a program (in any OS), we can do whatever (de)compression is needed 
on the fly.

Kit
________________________________________________________________________
Christopher F Baum, Boston College Economics, Chestnut Hill MA 02467 USA
baum@bc.edu                              http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec/baum.php

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