On 5/6/05, Hans J. Baumgartner <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear statalist,
>
> I am using Stata8 on a Unix machine.
>
> I am using the a shell to erase some files, but while doing so Stata does
> not find the end of the loop. Why?
>
> Example
>
> foreach x in ? {
> do something
> ! rm ${temp}/*.*
> }
>
> Stata does not read the closing bracket.
>
Stata's not seeing the end of the loop becuase it see '/*' as the
start of a comment section and anything that follows is ignored until
there is a closing '*/'
I've encountered this before, and couldn't work out any sort of
general solution. I resolved the problem by replacing *.* with a
small amount of text that was common to the leading part of the
filename. This may require you to slightly modify the do-file that
you are calling within the loop, so that temporary files carry a
prefix. For example...
foreach x in ?{
do something
!rm ${temp}/_*.*
}
...would workaround this problem.
I guess you could escape the forward slash that follows the leading
bracket, but I can't find anything, and using the backslash to escape
it (i.e. !rm ${temp}\/*.*) does not work.
If anyone knows how to work around this I'd be interested to know.
HTH's & thanks in advance
Neil
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