st: How to get a temporary file handle within mata?

[Andrew Maurer <Andrew.Maurer@qrm.com>]

Hi Statalist,

I am writing a mata function that writes to a file using fopen(), fwrite(), and fclose(). I run into issues if the function returns an error and aborts between fopen() and fclose(). The file stays open, can't be manually deleted, and the file handle can't be accessed to fclose() it, since the file handle was a local mata object.

In Stata I would write:
tempname  fid
file open `fid' using myfile.txt
---- code ----
file close `fid'

That way, if the program aborts in ---- code ----, the file is automatically closed. Is there a similar method that may be used within mata? The only workaround I have so far is to use st_tempfilename() to start writing to a temporary file, and at the end of the function overwrite the actual file with the temporary file.

Thank you,

Andrew Maurer 



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