st: Disk caching (?), Win XP, Textpad, and Stata

[Mike Lacy <Michael.Lacy@colostate.edu>]

Greetings,

I recently found out that I am experiencing occasions in which, 
having saved a modified version of a program before rerunning it in 
Stata, the new version does not get run, but instead version from 
perhaps seconds ago is run, giving the same error repeated.  I write 
and run Stata programs in Textpad, and go back and forth from Stata 
to Textpad, modifying code, rerunning it, etc.

After thinking I was losing my mind ("I swore I just corrected that 
spelling mistake 2 sec. ago.  Why is it still there?")  What I think 
is going on is that, between whatever write-behind disk caching XP 
does (even when one turns it off), and whatever file-caching Stata 
might do, and whatever Textpad might do, a file saved in Textpad, 
even when saved several times in succession, is not resulting in the 
version being accessed by "do myfile.do" being the freshest version. 
I find that doining a "save-as" rather than a "save" (but to the same 
filename) avoids the problem, but I don't think that this definitely 
conficts any one of the several softwares involved.

I'm running v.11, updated.   It's my casual impression that I did not 
have this problem come up in v. 9 or 10.  Anyone else experience 
this, or have any ideas for a cure?  The problem, I think, could be 
either a main effect or interaction of the several software 
programs.  And yes, I could change to a different OS or different 
text editor, but that seems like overkill for this problem.  Using 
the built-in do file editor, for me, is not a choice until it permits 
remapping of the keyboard, contains good search and replace features, 
reg. expressions, etc.
FWIW, I've had this problem on more than one Wintel machines, of 
quite different vintages.

Regards,
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Mike Lacy, Assoc. Prof.
Soc. Dept., Colo. State. Univ.
Fort Collins CO 80523 USA
(970)-491-6721   


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