st: Stata 11 v Stata 12: difference in batch mode behaviour

[Dave Ewart <davee@ceu.ox.ac.uk>]

In the following, I use 'stata11' as a command to mean Stata 11's
'stata' and 'stata12' for Stata 12's 'stata.  Both are running on Linux.

I noticed when testing Stata 12 that a previously-working batch job was
failing.

The old job was launched as follows:

    stata11 -b something.do

and it put correct output into something.log

But,

    stata12 -b something.do

fails and puts output like the following into an output logfile called
stata.log:

       . doedit something.do 
       unrecognized command:  doedit
       r(199);

Very strange?  It's launching 'doedit' against the supplied DO file?

Then I realised that perhaps I've been playing against the rules all
these years and found that I should actually have been using

    stata11 -b do something.do

(that is, include the 'do' command).  However, Stata prior to Stata 12
has previously taken a simple DO file parameter as a file to be executed
with 'do'; Stata 12 appears to be trying to 'doedit' it instead.

Can anyone shed any light on the above?

I have a number of staff around the department who may well be using the
"-b something.do" form rather than "-b do something.do" who will be
nagging me soon, so if there's a way to change the Stata execution mode
from 'doedit' back to 'do', that would be great!

Thanks,

Dave.

-- 
Dave Ewart
davee@ceu.ox.ac.uk
Computing Manager, Cancer Epidemiology Unit
University of Oxford / Cancer Research UK
N 51.7516, W 1.2152
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