st: Re: moving between Mac and Windows

[Christopher F Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 02:33 AM, Michael wrote:

> you might be able to attack you problem by code like this:
>
> early in you do file, define the drive:
>
> local drive=cond("$S_OS"=="Windows","C:",":C")
>
> ..then later code:
>
> use `drive'`c(dirsep)'stata`c(dirsep)'auto, clear
As Alan points out, changing dirsep is not necessary (nor desirable). 
The colon separator is left over from pre-OS X Macs. OS X Macs are Unix 
machines, so you can always refer to a directory with forward slashes, 
e.g. /Applications/Stata/auto.dta will refer to the Stata home 
directory:

[Blackbird:~] baum% ls -l /Applications/Stata/auto.dta
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  5323 Dec 22  2002 
/Applications/Stata/auto.dta

Indeed, the external hard drive may be referred to as a Unix filesystem 
under OS X, as in this example using my iPod as an external HD:

[Blackbird:~] baum% ls -l "/Volumes/Kit Baum's iPod/auto.dta"
-rw-r--r--  1 baum  unknown  5323 Dec 22  2002 /Volumes/Kit Baum's 
iPod/auto.dta

(Quoting the filename is necessary since the iPod's name contains 
spaces)

Since accessing Windows files within Stata will also work with the 
forward slash (rather than the DOS  backslash), the directory separator 
is not the issue; only the hard disk name must be tweaked between 
systems. If the hard disk name does not contain embedded spaces, this 
will be simpler, as Michael shows above.

Kit

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