Re: st: winexec on Stata for Linux

[Alan Riley <ariley@stata.com>]

Ulrich Kohler (kohler@wzb.eu) is trying to launch another
program from within Stata for Linux using the -winexec- command.
He is trying to pass a filename containing a space as an argument
to that program and is receiving an error:

> . sysuse auto
> . sc weight mpg
> . graph export foo.eps, replace
> ... 
> . copy "foo.eps"  "fo o.eps"
> 
> -winexec- seem to be not able to open the file. I tried:
> 
> . winexec xdg-open fo o.eps
> . winexec xdg-open "fo o.eps"
> . winexec xdg-open fo\ o.eps
> . winexec xdg-open 'fo o.eps'
> ...
> 
> but non of these produced any output at all (i.e. no error messages, no
> messages from the shell, nor any window popping up; just the Stata
> prompt.).
> ...

What Uli would like to do is escape the space in the filename.  His
guess to type

    . winexec xdg-open fo\ o.eps

was a good one, as \ is the character in Unix/Linux to escape a space
or other special character.

However, -winexec- does not currently allow spaces to be escaped.  It
should, and this will be fixed in a future update.

In the meantime, Uli can work around this by using a standard
shell command, directing its output to /dev/null, and running it
in the background.  In this way the command will return control
immediately to Stata.

Depending on whether Uli is using bash, tcsh, or some other shell in
Linux, one of the following two commands should work from within Stata:

   . shell xdg-open fo\ o.eps > /dev/null 2>&1 &

or

   . shell xdg-open fo\ o.eps >& /dev/null &



--Alan
ariley@stata.com
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