Re: st: I can't get fs to work from inside a do file

[n j cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

Gabi Huiber sent in a question about my -fs- (downloadable from SSC) and 
 Joseph Coveney and Michael Blasnik gave various good advice. I didn't
see in the thread following any details on what kind of values the 
global ${paper} might take on.

If that global included embedded spaces say "foo bar", then
after macro substitution the command line would read

fs prototype/foo bar/*.do

and Stata's standard command line processing would cause -fs- to see two 
arguments

prototype/foo

bar/*.do

and you might well find that no such files are reported to exist. As 
always the remedy for that is to bind the argument in double quotes, as
in

fs "prototype/${paper}/*.do"

and in any case that should do no harm. However, it does seem unlikely 
that this is biting, as you can get it to work in some cases and not 
others.

Presumably you have checked that your current working directory in the 
interactive session and that for the do file are the same.

Beyond that, my only suggestion is to remember that -fs- is just a 
wrapper. Trying the underlying Stata command might help identify whether 
you have found a bug or limitation in -fs- or a bug or limitation in the 
 underlying command, in this case

local files : dir "prototype/${paper}" files "*.do"

Some time I ago I reported to StataCorp a bug in -: dir- which underlay 
what had been reported to me as a bug in -fs-. I don't know if it was 
ever fixed.

Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk

Gabi Huiber
===========

Nick Cox has this little command called fs, which reads the files in a
certain folder and remembers them in r(files). I tried to use it to
run a bunch of do-files from inside a root do-file, because the name
and number of these subsequent do-files can vary between the
sub-folders of interest. So here's what I did:


. ***************** CALL DO-FILES SPECIFIC TO EACH ${paper} HERE
.
. fs prototype/${paper}/*.do
> local dofiles=r(files)
>
> foreach k of local dofiles {
> do "prototype/${paper}/`k'"
> }
>
> clear
> di "goodbye"

As you can see, Stata breezes right through the lines after fs. It
also does not interpret fs: display r(files) shows nothing. However, I
can copy the fs line from the results window and paste it in the
command window, and it will execute just fine. Ditto for all the lines
below it.

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