I'm aware of the package touch, which does exactly this. However after installing and using the package, Stata 12 SE (Mac 10.9.5) says:
The touch command has been deprecated.
Is there an alternative? I need this to initialize a blank result file, so that I can append my regression result in a loop without caring whether I'm in the first iteration or not.
NEW ANSWER
Use one of the following in your do file to create the blank xls file "newfile.xls":
shell echo /dev/null > newfile.xls
which will overwrite existing files of the same name. To create a new blank file of that name:
shell touch newfile.xls
would also work. However if a file of the same name exists, touch would only change the modification and access times.
OLD ANSWER
The following will save an empty Stata data file "newdata.dta". Substitute your own name.
save newdata, emptyok
With Mac, you can just use the native touch: !touch filename.xls,
or
!> empty_results.txt, if you want to over-write an existing file or create it if it does not exist.
Related
I'm trying to make an batch file that will copy the contents of a .cfg file into another .cfg file. The problem I'm having is that I want the contents of the first file to be placed at specific lines of the destination file, for example, placing the contents between line 300 and 343 and overwriting the original content within those lines.
Any way of doing this?
If there isn't a way to detect specific lines maybe there is a way to detect a specific string, like an ID?
If you are allowed to use 3rd party tools in your environment you can use a regex CLI tool to find and then replace the lines / values you need. The tool can be called using batch scripts.
Example Tools from another question:
https://superuser.com/questions/339118/regex-replace-from-command-line
I am writing a simple batch script, and I need to delete one line from the file that gets downloaded by the script. What is the easiest way to do this using ONLY the command prompt? I have come across several various suggestions, but nothing to very simply delete one string that is constant across all files that are downloaded with the script.
This is a very platform dependant question. If you are using a *nix environment (Linux / Mac environment using bash / shell), you can accomplish this with sed
sed '/${regular_expression_that_matches_line_to_be_removed}/d' yourFile.txt > newFile.txt
This will generate a new file called newFile.txt that will contain the output. You can also do this in place (it modifies the file it's using as input), but I recommend against that because if you mess up your regex, you've lost your input.
If you're using a Windows environment (which I assume you are due to your batch-file tag), try looking at this Delete certain lines in a txt file via a batch file
I have to read a file in my shell script. I was using PL/SQL's UTL_FILE to open the file.
But I have to do a new change which will append timestamp to the file.
e.g import.data file becomes import_20152005101200.data
Now timestamp is the time at which file arrive at the server.
Since the file name changed I can't use the old way of file accessing.
I came up with below solution:
UTL_FILE.FOPEN ('path','import_${file_date}.data','r');
To achieve this I have to get filename and trim it using SUBSTR to get timestamp and pass to file_date variable.
However I am not able to find how to access filename in a particular path. I can use basename. But My file name keeps changing because of timestamp.
Any help/ alternate ideas are welcome.
PL/SQL isn't a good tool to solve this problem; UTL_FILE doesn't have any tools to list all the files in a folder.
A better solution is to define a stored procedure which uses UTL_FILE and pass the file name to process as an argument to the procedure. That way, you use the shell (which has many powerful commands and tools to examine folders and files) or a script language like Python to determine which file to process.
I have bunch of files that need to have a (.) dot removed from the file-name. Eg. "Mr.-John-Smith.jpg" to "Mr-John-Smith.jpg". I don't have real experience with programming and know only html/css and a little javascript. I found another identical question here on stackoverflow, but what I gathered it was fixed on linux system and BASH was used.
Anyways, if anyone could provide me a tutorial on which program to use for this and what code to execute in that program to make it happen I'd be grateful.
if you are using a windows environment (which i guess you do)
you can download this free utility to mass change file names !
main page :
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php
download page :
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Download.php
its easy to use
enjoy
If your file names in a file...
1- Open Microsoft Word or any text editor. Press ctrl+h and then search "." without quotes then replace it with blank character.
2- It will remove all dots, again bring "." to your file extention such as .jpg , .png searh your file extention for example "jpg" and replace it with ".jpg"
It will works %100, i am using this method everytime.
if they are not in a file and if you want do somethings in your operation systems' file system
Try this program. It is very useful for this operation;
Download
To remove all except the extension dot from all files in a directory, you can use PowerShell that comes with newer versions of Windows, and can be downloaded for older versions;
Line breaks inserted for readability, this should go on one line;
PS> dir | rename-item -newname {
[System.IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($_.name).Replace(".","") +
[System.IO.Path]::GetExtension($_.name); }
What it does is to take the file name without an extension and remove all dots in it, and then add back the extension. It then renames the file to the resulting name.
This will change for example do.it.now to doit.now, or in your case, Mr.-John-Smith.jpg to Mr-John-Smith.jpg.
Question:
Can inotify be used to reliably record files in a [linux] system?
Details:
I am attempting to use inotifywait to track users movements (currently using bash, but it has been suggested that I migrate to a scripting language). Ultimately I want to add new files to a database upon creation (create, moved_from), update existing rows in a database upon file modification (modify, attrib, move_to), and finally remove a row upon file deletion (delete). I am, however, running into many problems as even an action as seemingly simple as save, generates many inotifywait messages. Observe the following commands and their output (note, the use of /home/user/ is purely for example purposes):
Examples:
Example 1: Listen for file creation:
$ inotifywait -mr /home/user/ -e create --format %w:%f:%e:%T --timefmt %T
Touch:
$touch test.txt
/home/user/:test.txt:CREATE:21:35:30
Open a new file with vim then issue :w command:
$vim test2.txt
/home/user/:test2.txt:CREATE:21:35:30
Open an existing file with vim then issue :w command:
$vim test2.txt
/home/user/:4913:CREATE:21:35:30
/home/user/:test2.txt:CREATE:21:35:30
Open a new file with gedit then click save:
$gedit test3.txt
/home/user/:test3.txt~:CREATE:21:35:30
Open an existing file with gedit then click save:
$gedit test3.txt
/home/user/:.goutputstream-HN3ZDW:CREATE:21:35:30
/home/user/:test3.txt~:CREATE:21:35:30
Note that not only are two new files displayed as having ben created (4913 and .goutputstream-HN3ZDW), but also that the only file being created is test3.txt~ and not test3.txt, even though the file test3.txt is created when checked with the ls command. For completeness, here is the above example, but with a few more options.
Example 1: Listen for file creation, modification, deltion, and movement:
$ inotifywait -mr /home/user/ -e create -e modify -e delete -e moved_to -e moved_from --format %w:%f:%e:%T --timefmt %T
Touch:
$touch test.txt
/home/user/:test.txt:CREATE:21:35:30
Open a new file with vim then issue :w command:
$vim test2.txt
/home/user/:test2.txt:CREATE:22:12:32
Open an existing file with vim then issue :w command:
$vim test2.txt
/home/user/:4913:CREATE:22:04:35
/home/user/:4913:DELETE:22:04:35
/home/user/:test2.txt:MOVED_FROM:22:04:35
/home/user/:test2.txt~:MOVED_TO:22:04:35
/home/user/:test2.txt:CREATE:22:04:35
/home/user/:test2.txt~:DELETE:22:04:35
Open a new file with gedit then click save:
$gedit test3.txt
/home/user/:test3.txt~:CREATE:21:35:30
Open an existing file with gedit then click save:
$gedit test3.txt
/home/user/:.goutputstream-0WQ2DW:CREATE:22:06:34
/home/user/:test3.txt~:CREATE:22:06:34
/home/user/:.goutputstream-0WQ2DW:MOVED_FROM:22:06:34
/home/user/:test3.txt:MOVED_TO:22:06:34
Basically my question is "is it possible to use inotify to update a file in a database"? For example, if a user edits a file and saves it, I want it to be reflected in the database as an update to that file, and not a brand new file replacing a completely different file. Any help would be greatly appreciated, even if it's a suggestion pointing me in a different direction.
inotify tells you what happens like it happens.
Gedit, like most editors, saves by first writing a temporary file then moving that file into place. This avoids overwriting the file with a half-written version in case the editor or the whole system crashes while the file is being written. Vim takes a different approach (this can be configured, I won't go into details here — see e.g. why inode value changes when we edit in “vi” editor?): it first creates a temporary backup file, then writes the new file.
If you want these to be recorded as a single editing event, you'll have to perform some pattern recognition on the even log. A create-write-move sequence that replaces an existing file and a create-move-create delete sequence like vim's would be the archetypal patterns. Note that the pattern might be interleaved with other events.
I have a suspicion that there's a better way to do what you want to do, but I don't understand what you're trying to do. If you're trying to log user actions, you have already found a way, but there are simpler ways: loggedfs or the audit subsystem. If you want to keep a backup of all file versions, either hook up the editor to a version control system (this lets users control what gets backed up) or use a versioning filesystem such as copyfs. You can even store the files in the database directly, by using a filesystem like mysqlfs or postgresqlfs (admittedly neither project looks maintained).