st: -filei- available on SSC

[n j cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

Thanks to the ever-active Excelophile Kit Baum, a new package -filei-
is now available from SSC. Stata 8.2 is required.

This one-program package was a response to a question
from Hendri Adriaens on 27 July:

<http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/lwgate/STATALIST/archives/statalist.0707/Author/article-811.html> 

Contrary to common habit, I would like to emphasise how
little this program does. Here is most of the help.
If it doesn't put you off, use -ssc- to install.

Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk

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help for filei
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Write lines to end or beginning of text files

        filei + [`"|"]text["|"'] ["]filename["]
        filei - [`"|"]text["|"'] ["]filename["]

Description

-filei- is an immediate command (hence the suffix -i-) that can be used 
to add extra lines to text files.

The simple forms -filei + "text" filename- and -filei - "text" filename- 
add a line including text at the end (+) or at the beginning (-) of 
filename. The quote marks " " are not essential if text is a single 
'word' (meaning, it contains no embedded spaces: Stata and 42 are both 
words). Conversely, quote marks around filename are essential if it 
includes embedded spaces.  Compound double quotes `" "' around text are 
essential if text includes one or more embedded quote marks.

There is asymmetry: if filename does not exist, the + syntax may be used
to create a one-line file, but the - syntax returns an error.

Remarks

-filei- is deliberately minimal and designed only to fill a very small 
gap, as (in the author's view) this minimal task should be minimally 
easy to do in Stata. More elaborate problems require more elaborate 
commands or programs, which exist in abundance. This sentence confirms 
that -filei- includes no syntax to delete lines or to insert lines in 
the middle of files.

-filei- may be used repeatedly to write successive lines to files. That 
is the user's call, but be warned that it is very inefficient, as files 
will be opened and closed repeatedly.  You should consider using (e.g.) 
-file- instead, or even a text editor.

*
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