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st: RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Utility for Changing Directories


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   st: RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Utility for Changing Directories
Date   Wed, 30 Oct 2002 17:12:42 -0000

Patrick Joly
> 
> Until now, I had no idea -cmdname- existed despite having 
> contributed a
> number of files to SSC.  Ignorance is no excuse, however, 
> the lack of uptake
> w.r.t -cmdname- is not surprising given how little publicity it got
> recently: a search of all 35,000 messages on the Statalist 
> archive doesn't
> turn up any references to -cmdname-.  The fact that -findit 
> cmdname- points
> to an insert in STB-51 is moot since you have to know the 
> command exists
> before even thinking of running the search.

Not quite. For example, 

. findit command name 

and (even better) 

. findit registration 

would have worked. Of course, this is an old
problem with many variants, and sometimes 
only if you know the answer can you 
formulate the optimum question: 

"Your spelling is appalling. Make sure 
you look up words you don't know 
in the dictionary!" 

"But if I don't how to spell the 
word, how do I find it in the dictionary?" 

In the case of -findit-, the problem is clearly 
identifying the keywords which specify 
what you want without too many false positives
or false negatives. 

But there is one thing users can do, if 
they find out about something indirectly, 
at least as far as what is in official 
Stata or STB/SJ is concerned. 

Once you found something with difficulty, 
you can rummage around in the stata*.key 
files and see what the keywords are 
for that topic. These files are 
in the s subdirectory off what -sysdir- 
calls UPDATES, and they are pure text files, 
so a good text editor will have no problem. 

Having said, the advice is not to _change_
these files yourself, if only because
next update they may be overwritten 
anyway, but to suggest to Stata Corp 
keywords to be added. 


Nick 
[email protected] 
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/



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