Problem opening graphs

[Jamie Furlong]

Hi,

I am a new user to stata (excuse my lack of knowledge hereafter!) and have encountered a persistent problem opening graphs. I save my graph and whenever I try and open it, I get the following message:

file \filestore.soton.ac.uk\users\------\mydocuments\DATA\BES 2015 + Census 2011\Deprivation Labour2015.gph not found

etc.

As you can see, my files are saved on a university network. I don't know if this has any impact upon the re-opening of the graphs.

I'd really appreciate if anyone can offer guidance on this. It is really annoying not to be able to edit graphs I've made previously!

Many thanks,
Jamie

[Clyde Schechter]

A couple of possibilities suggest themselves:

1. Are you sure there are no typographical errors in the pathname you have provided? It's long enough that the probability of a mistake is pretty high. Also, can you just open that directory and verify that the file actually is there? (e.g. perhaps it was saved under some slightly different name, or was never saved at all.)

2. Some operating systems impose limits on the length of a full pathname. The one you posted is 98 characters. It may be too long. Have you tried changing working directory to the one containing the file and then just -graph use "Deprivation Labour2015.gph"-?

3. Is the file you are trying to access open in some other application, or opened by another user on your network?

4. Do you have read privileges for this directory?

5. Are you doing this inside a loop? CPUs are fast and disk drives are slow. If you are running a loop that opens a bunch of files, if the disk drive falls too far behind, the operating system may simply tell Stata that it can't do this file read--Stata usually assumes that's because the file wasn't found, but that's not always the case. If this is the problem, the solution is to place one or more -sleep- commands inside the loop so that Stata will wait for the disk drive to catch up before trying to read the next file. You have to experiment with the number of milliseconds to specify here--it depends on a lot of different system factors. I would start small, maybe -sleep 50-, and work my way up in increments of -sleep 50- until you find the shortest -sleep- duration that let's you read all the files.

Hope one of these solves your problem.

[Friedrich Huebler]

Clyde gave useful advice. I would also suggest showing us the exact commands that you used to save and open the graphs.