I guess you need to try to fool the parser
by, as it were, smuggling your slash through
customs without it being spotted.
I'd try
local slash "/"
...
! rm ${temp}`slash'*.*
in the hope that the splitting off of
comments precedes the interpretation of
the local macro.
Nick
[email protected]
Neil Shephard replied to Hans J. Baumgartner
> > I am using Stata8 on a Unix machine.
> >
> > I am using the a shell to erase some files, but while doing
> so Stata does
> > not find the end of the loop. Why?
> >
> > Example
> >
> > foreach x in ? {
> > do something
> > ! rm ${temp}/*.*
> > }
> >
> > Stata does not read the closing bracket.
> >
>
> Stata's not seeing the end of the loop becuase it see '/*' as the
> start of a comment section and anything that follows is ignored until
> there is a closing '*/'
>
> I've encountered this before, and couldn't work out any sort of
> general solution. I resolved the problem by replacing *.* with a
> small amount of text that was common to the leading part of the
> filename. This may require you to slightly modify the do-file that
> you are calling within the loop, so that temporary files carry a
> prefix. For example...
>
> foreach x in ?{
> do something
> !rm ${temp}/_*.*
> }
>
> ...would workaround this problem.
>
> I guess you could escape the forward slash that follows the leading
> bracket, but I can't find anything, and using the backslash to escape
> it (i.e. !rm ${temp}\/*.*) does not work.
>
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