Wrapper for "stata -b" which issues an informative error msg and appropriate (i.e., non-zero) return code

statab

#! /bin/bash
# Wrapper for "stata -b" which issues an informative error msg and appropriate
# (i.e., non-zero) return code

# The basic idea for this script (including grepping the log file to determine
# whether there was an error) was taken from a similar script posted by Brendan
# Halpin on his blog at http://teaching.sociology.ul.ie/bhalpin/wordpress/?p=122

args=$#  # number of args

cmd=""
if [ "$1" = "do" ] && [ "$args" -gt 1 ]
then
    log="`basename -s .do "$2"`.log"
    # mimic Stata's behavior (stata-se -b do "foo bar.do" -> foo.log)
    log=${log/% */.log}
# Stata requires explicit -do- command, but we relax this to permit just the
# name of a single do-file
elif [ "$args" -eq 1 ] && [ "${1##*.}" = "do" ] && [ "$1" != "do" ]
then
    cmd="do"
    log="`basename -s .do "$1"`.log"
    log=${log/% */.log}
else
    # else Stata interprets it as a command and logs to stata.log
    log="stata.log"    
fi

# in batch mode, nothing sent to stdout (is this guaranteed?)
stderr=`stata-se -b $cmd "$@" 2>&1`
rc=$?
if [ -n "$stderr" ]  # typically usage info
then
    echo "$stderr"
    exit $rc
elif [ $rc != "0" ]
then
    exit $rc
else
    # use --max-count to avoid matching final line ("end of do-file") when
    # do-file terminates with error
    if egrep --before-context=1 --max-count=1 "^r\([0-9]+\);$" "$log"
    then
        exit 1
    fi
fi

Great code. One note is that compiled plugins can output to stdout even in batch mode. The current version of -synth- outputs lots of debugging info. For long jobs I pipe the output through "tail -100 " so that it doesn't create huge files.

@pschumm you're my hero.

This is great! It's crazy that Stata doesn't output correct return codes.

I ended up finding it easier having a simple script checklog.sh:

#! /usr/bin/env bash
if egrep --before-context=1 --max-count=1 "^r\([0-9]+\);$" "${1:-/dev/stdin}"
then
    exit 1
else
    exit 0
fi

and then just running it after calling stata -b, like so:

stata -b do script.do; bash checklog.sh script.log

This is nice because it also supports reading the log from stdin. So if I'm running dyntext on a file, I'll do:

stata < <(echo "dyntext file.domd, saving(file.md)") | bash checklog.sh

and it'll still catch any errors.