Re: st: RE: combining many data files

["Michael S. Hanson" <mshanson@wesleyan.edu>]

On Nov 19, 2008, at 10:16 PM, Mingfeng Lin wrote:

> For renaming files (as Kyle mentioned), I just remembered a trick to
> rename a large number of files simultaneously on Windows (at least on
> XP): select all files you want to rename, then, with cursor pointed at
> the first file (all other files still selected), right click and
> choose "rename".  Then type in something like
> file(1).dta
> and you'll see all other files renamed into file(2).dta, file(3).dta
> etc. But it only works on Windows - for Mac users the extended
> function could be the only way out.

Macintosh users have numerous ways to accomplish the objective of  
batch renaming files, such as in the above example:

1. Use an Automator action.  It is quite easy to link a few Finder  
actions and save as a contextual menu plug-in for the Finder that you  
can use to rename files in all sorts of ways, including sequential  
numbering.  Just control-click or right-click on the selected files  
and select your saved plug-in.  Alternatively, you can download a pre- 
made action from, say, <http://automatorworld.com/archives/batch- 
rename/>.


2. Use a Unix script.  Indeed, one could write a script, save it as  
an executable file, and run it from within Stata with the -shell-  
command.  There are an extremely large number of ways to write such a  
script;  here is a quick one that works from the bash command line  
(i.e., within Terminal.app), similar to the example above:

i=1; for x in *.dta; do cp -p $x file$i.dta; i=$(($i+1)); done

Notice here I have actually copied the files instead of simply  
renaming them, so the originals are preserved.  To just rename,  
replace "cp -p" with "mv".


3. Use a freeware/shareware utility.  There are at least a dozen;  
here are a few:
<http://www.manytricks.com/namemangler/>
<http://www.mrrsoftware.com/MRRSoftware/NameChanger.html>
<http://software.christopherdrum.com/filewrangler/>

The first two require Mac OS X 10.5; the last will run on version  
10.3 and up.


Hope this helps,
Mike
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