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

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

On Wednesday, 05.10.2011 at 11:56 -0500, jhassell@stata.com wrote:

> Dave Ewart <davee@ceu.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> It was fortuitous that 'stata11 -b something.do' worked in the
> way that Dave described.  The correct syntax for batch mode is
> 'stata11 -b do something.do'.  The reason this worked is that
> Stata, when presented with a filename on the command line,
> attempts to determine what the proper command is to execute for
> that filename based on its extension.
> 
> We did change the default behavior of how the '.do' file extension
> is handled in Stata 12.  Previously, Stata would interpret the .do 
> extension and insert the -do- command before the filename.  In Stata 12 
> the interpretation was changed so that the default action is now -doedit-.
> This change was made because we received significant user feedback that
> their preferred behavior was to edit a do-file when they double-clicked 
> on a filename or if they dragged and dropped the file onto Stata.  This 
> is significant because the mechanism that Windowed environments use to 
> process double-click or drag and drop behavior is to pass the filename
> to the application and then the application must determine how to handle
> the file, and that is exactly how command line arguments are processed.

Thanks for the informative reply, James.  Much appreciated.

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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