Danielle H. Ferry
> It has
> become glaringly obvious that I don't understand the
> purpose of -tempname-
> here. Can someone please explain?
Well, in fact, I guess it's dispensable.
You need a postname; it's just a convention
to use a temporary name, as that way Stata
_guarantees_ that it will not get confused
with any other file operations it may be
doing concurrently.
Without a tempname you lose that guarantee,
but problems are perhaps unlikely in
most situations. You would have to work
quite hard at it e.g. using the same
postname for different operations in different
programs in the same session could produce
an interesting mess.
