Good trick, I will use this. I recently advocated the addition
of an [empty] option to -append-, which would force -append- to
act like -use- if there were no dataset in memory. However, those
who don't often -append- didn't see the hardship in trapping the
first file.
cheers,
Jeph
Jens Lauritsen wrote:
A simple technique can be useful to "trick" Stata to behave like a
dataset exists:
* create an empty dataset with one observation and one variable:
set obs 1
gen articifialvar = 1
* now you can do anything where Stata expects an open data set to be
present, e.g. from
* the current discussion:
qui fs *
foreach f in `r(files)' {
append using `f'
}
* following appending all the files the first imaginary observation and
variable can be dropped:
drop artificialvar
drop in 1
regards
Jens Lauritsen
Odense, Denmark
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* For searches and help try:
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* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
