On Jan 19, 2004, at 2:33 AM, Tim wrote:
Can Stata for Unix operate in a similar fashion? If I have a network
Stata
license for Unix can I submit jobs in batch mode from my PC (with a
Window
OS) or do I have to have a PC with Unix installed? Can I submit
"batch"
jobs as I would with SAS?
Your remote server is a "mainframe", so you can connect to it with any
terminal emulator program (even the crappy telnet client built in to
Windows, but I would suggest finding something better) and command Unix
Stata to do whatever you would like. From the Mac OS X laptop on which
I type, I open a console window (no need for a terminal emulator, since
OS X _is_ Unix) and say "ssh -l baum econ.bc.edu" to connect to the
command line on my Unix server (ssh is secure telnet). Then "stata -b
do program" will start a Unix batch job, run program.do, create the
output in program.out. I can view the output on the Unix machine using
"cat" or "more", edit it with a command-line editor like "pico", and
pull it back to the laptop system with an FTP client (on a PC, WS_FTP
LE is recommended). So you do not need Unix on your local system, be it
Windows or Mac. If you want to see graphs, etc. run something like VNC
(virtual network computing) that will enable you to view the XWindow
GUI of the Sun on your PC desktop (VNC is free). But if all you need is
the command line (and "tail program.log" to see whether the batch job
worked or not), you don't need the GUI. Note that once you have started
the Stata batch job you may log off the Unix machine; Stata will just
clank away on its own (make sure the sysadmin allows a suitable number
of concurrent batch jobs).
NB: a Unix Stata n-user network license constrains the number of
_distinct usernames_ who are concurrently using Stata, not the number
of processes they're running. If you run that batch job (which will
take a while, let's say) and then start up Stata interactively on Unix
to look at some other stuff, you are still only taking up one user slot
on the license (not two).
Kit
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