I've toyed with the idea of doing something similar. It would be fairly easy to write a "C" plugin to do what you want, as the Stata plugin architecture provides a way to return a macro from within the C plugin (see www.stata.com/plugins/).
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Jeph Herrin
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 10:35 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: st: timestamps, GNU/make-style Stata program
James,
Interesting question. Seems like the easiest way would be
to capture the output of -ls- and parse the timestamp out
of that. It is not exceedingly efficient but I think it would
be platform independent.
cheers,
Jeph
James Muller wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> I'm wishing to do something (described below), but am unsure of exactly
> how to implement it (question at bottom). Read on.
>
> I'm wishing to implement something like GNU/make in a project I'm
> working on. That is, something that will compare file timestamps to see
> whether a dataset, for instance, needs to be rebuilt from a set of
> scripts. If the timestamp on the do files is more recent than that of
> the dataset it generates then the dataset should be regenerated. This is
> a very efficient way of resolving dependencies and such.
>
> I've been looking hard and can't find anything within Stata that returns
> the timestamp of a file. The only way I can find to do this on a .dta
> file is by reading the file contents itself (there is a text-formatted
> timestamp in the header of the file). I can't find a way to check the
> timestamp of any other type of file.
>
> There are two alternatives I can see:
> 1. Call the operating system to return the code, try to somehow capture
> the output.
> 2. Use the checksum function along with some other files that contain
> the last known checksum.
>
> Assuming there isn't anything within Stata to do this, the operating
> system method is best, but I'm not sure how to capture the OS output -
> do something with environment variables, perhaps.
>
> So here's what I ask:
> 1. Has anybody tried to do something similar before? If so, what was
> your experience?
> 2. Is there an internal Stata method to read the timestamp of a file?
> Version 8.2 preferable to version 9.0.
> 3. If not, does anybody have any experience with capturing operating
> system output to Stata?
> 4. Any comments, etc, at all?
>
> Cheers in advance
>
> James
>
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>
>
*
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