Fred is starting us a down a slippery slope
with the best of intentions.
Forget that this is Windows and whatever
prejudices you have about that as an operating system
(OS). The same principle should apply to all OS here.
In general, whenever Stata gets a message
from an OS, it should report it.
Sometimes, like Stata on occasion, an OS gets confused or sends
a misleading or even incorrect message, and Fred
has a good example here.
But once Stata starts trying to be smarter than the OS,
things get more complicated. On the whole, unless Stata
can be certain that the OS is wrong, and I suspect that
is rarely if ever true, it really shouldn't try to act as
intermediary or interpreter.
So I would go the other way on this.
Nick
[email protected]
Fred Wolfe
> Using Windows XP and Stata 9.1 I received the following error:
>
> file c:\statdata\cancer\mkcancerfile.log cannot be modified
> or erased; in
> read-only directory
> r(608);
>
> I presume this is a Stata interpretation of a Windows message.
>
> What caused the error was not the I was in a read-only
> directory, but that
> I was running two versions of Stata and the log was open in
> the first Stata
> at the same time I was trying to open it in the second Stata.
>
> I want to suggest that the error message be altered slightly
> to indicate
> that this other cause, as the directory was not read-only.
>
> Perhaps it could say " ... file ... cannot be modified or erased; in
> read-only directory or read-only file (file may be open)
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