At 02:33 PM 1/22/2004 -0500, Richard Williams wrote:
My students are using Stata this semester, and I want them to be able to
use various user-written programs. Apparently, however, they could
install stuff on cluster machines, but it would be gone the next day. The
network administrator is willing to install some stuff permanently, but I
don't want to be harassing him every week as I figure out what I want!
Students do, however, have networked drives they have regular read/write
access to (on our system, the H: drive).
Thanks to Nick, Paul, Alan and others for their excellent advice on this
problem. I am still working on the optimal strategy, but I plan to do
something like this. I have written a file called
-mystata.do-. Currently, it looks like this:
* These commands personalize your Stata directories
sysdir set OLDPLACE H:\ado
sysdir set PERSONAL H:\ado\personal
sysdir set PLUS H:\ado\plus
* This will run your personal profile.do if you have one.
capture run H:\ado\personal\profile.do
* You can add any other startup commands below or in your profile.do file
This will send any downloaded programs to the students own H: drive (where
they won't get deleted) and run the students' own -profile.do- if they have
one (the capture command will avoid the students seeing an error message if
they don't have a -profile.do- file).
If I could get the network administrators to go along, I would make this
the -profile.do- file on every cluster machine and have it run
automatically (or at least have an ado-file version of this that anyone
could execute by typing -mystata-). Since getting such cooperation may be
easier said than done, I may just mail the program to my students, tell
them to place it in H:\; and then when they start Stata, type
run H:\mystata
Also, I may consider the advice to set up a site of shared files, e.g.
sysdir set SITE whateveritis
If I do this, I would probably suggest that students add this to their own
-profile.do-, as I wouldn't want everybody on campus using this directory!
Thanks again for all the help! This is a less painful process than I
thought it would be. Rich
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