Re: st: Path to current .do file?

[Phil Schumm <pschumm@uchicago.edu>]

On Jul 17, 2013, at 8:00 PM, James Beard <james@beard.net> wrote:
> In a Stata .do file (I'm using Stata 12 on Windows) is it possible to find out the path to the currently executing .do file?


I don't believe so.


> I'm currently setting up some rather complicated data management in Stata, which will eventually have to deal with tens of thousands of files. Normally, I would put everything in the same folder, but in this case, that would become unmanageable. So, I have different folders for different sets of files. And I want to use relative paths to access them. If I was going to be running my .do files myself, I would just know that I have to start in the right place, but I can't guarantee that the people who will run them will do that. And I don't want to hard-wire paths in my .do files because the drive letters and paths to the "root" of my folder structure on the "production" system will be different from the root on my development system. So within each .do file, I want to -cd- to the folder in which each .do file is located, so the .do file can reliable locate files in other folders.  With apologies to non-Windows users, you can do this sort of thing with "DOS" batch files, with!
  -cd/d %~dp0-, so I could provide a .bat file wrapper for each of my .do files, but this isn't an ideal solution, and wouldn't actually stop someone running one of my .do files directly from the wrong folder.


You can accomplish what you describe above without having to resort to absolute paths (which you are correct to avoid), without putting all of your files in a single directory (which, as you note, would be unmanageable), and without a do-file knowing its own location.  To do this, start by creating a directory for the project, and within it whatever subdirectory structure you wish to organize your files.  Then, whenever you refer to a file location in a do-file (e.g., reading in a dataset, writing a file, running another do-file, etc.), use a relative path from the root of the project directory.  This way, any do-file is runnable from the root of the project, and there is no reason to be changing the working directory (which should always be set to the root of the project).  Your project is self-contained and portable, and I think you'll find that the code is easier to maintain, since your working directory remains constant (e.g., you can move do-files around within the proj!
 ect and they'll continue to work).

One more comment, since you mentioned making it easier for other people to run the do-files within your project.  If you use the strategy I described above, instructions for executing the do-files in a project become as simple as, for example,

    1. Launch Stata
    2. -cd- to the root of the project
    3. Type the following:

           do data_management/clean_data
           do data_management/build_analysis_file
           do analysis/summaries
           do analysis/fit_models
           do analysis/plots

which can then be placed in a README.txt file at the root of the project.  Alternatively, you can use a single do-file at the root of the project as a pseudo-Makefile, so that users can simply type

    do make clean_data
    do make analysis_file
    do make summaries
    do make models
    do make plots

or even just

    do make all

to do everything in one step.


-- Phil


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