Many thanks to Bill Gould for his prompt and helpful reply regarding files
left open by Mata after an error.
The -closeallfiles- workaround is good enough for me. I had looked for a
closeall command in Mata with no luck. I thought I couldn't use fclose()
because the file handle was local to a function, but now I learned that
handles are small integers and one can loop to close them all. (I take it
Bill's code assumes one hasn't opened more than 51 files. My workaround was
to open another file instead of exiting Stata, but even then I never got as
far as 50 :)
In terms of changes to Mata, I can understand why closing all files on error
might be irritating if you are writing code and opening files interactively,
although I wonder how often mere mortals do that. Bill's alternative
suggestion that -mata clear- should close all open files is excellent; it
seems so natural you'd think it would do that already. Having to reload code
is not an inconvenience at all, it hardly takes any time.
Going off thread for a second, I wonder if anyone mentioned in the SPSS vs.
Stata discussion how often the developers answer questions from users and,
hold on to your chair, say they will wait for user opinions before they do
anything. Priceless!
Germ�n
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of William Gould,
Stata
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2006 10:32 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: st: Files left open in Mata
German Rodriguez <[email protected]> complains that Mata leaves open
files opened by -_fopen()- after an error and helpfully provided a
program to create the condition and demonstrate the problem.
The situation is this: Somewhere in a program, German executes
fh = fopen("locked.txt", "w")
and then later in the program there is an error. German fixes the
mistake and reruns the program, but before he does that, he remembers
that he needs to erase locked.txt. He discovers he cannot erase the
files because the file was never closed! In desperation, German is
forced to -exit- and restart Stata, and that solves the problem.
I have a better solution:
-------------------------------- closeallfiles.ado ---
program closeallfiles
version 9
forvalues i=0(1)50 {
capture mata: fclose(`i')
}
end
-------------------------------- closeallfiles.ado ---
Rather than exit Stata to close the open files, from the Stata prompt,
type
. closeallfiles
More details
------------
-closeallfiles- is more a workaround than a solution.
What German discovered is a bug, but I'm unsure how best to fix it.
Closing all the open files is easy. The question is, when should they
be closed?
In an earlier version of Mata, Mata did close all open files on error, but
we
removed the feature because we found it irritating when working with Mata
interactively. If we made the tiniest mistake, the files we had opened
would be closed and we would have to start all over again. I admit it is
unlikely that anyone else would be working with -fopen()- and -fclose()-
interactively, bug it is possible.
For that reason, I do not suggest that all open files be closed on error,
although that is a possibility.
Instead, I suggest -mata clear- should close all open files.
-mata clear- is one of Mata's interpretive commands,
: mata clear
and it clears Mata. -mata clear- is called by Stata's -clear- command,
. clear
If we changed -mata clear-, then when German ran into his debugging
situation, he could clear rather than exiting and restarting Stata.
German would have to reload his programs, but I assume that they are
in a do-file and that would not be a problem.
I am open to other suggestions.
I will do nothing until German offers his opinion.
-- Bill
[email protected]
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