Shell

[William Blackmon]

Hello,

Complete novice shell user, please take mercy on me...

I am trying to run an executable via Stata's "shell" command. In case it matters, I'm running curl (http://www.confusedbycode.com/curl/) to download data via and API.

I was concerned there was a PATH issue, so specified the location of curl.exe explicitly.

I've tried three approaches:

1. No Stata: Success
a. Open command line directly
b. Manually copy into command window:

 "C:\Program Files\cURL\bin\curl.exe" blah blah

This is successful.

2. Partial Stata: Success
a. In Stata run:

 shell

b. Manually copy into shell window:

 "C:\Program Files\cURL\bin\curl.exe" blah blah

This is successful.

3. Fully in Stata: Failure
a. In Stata run:

 shell "C:\Program Files\cURL\bin\curl.exe" blah blah

This fails. It doesn't bring an error in the shell, but generates meaningless data rather than the data I want to download.


While I'm certainly in over my head, based on my understanding of Stata's shell command, I believe (2) and (3) are functionally exactly equivalent. Any idea what is different, and/or what is causing (3) to fail?

Thanks very much!

[ericmelse]

Dear William,
In my own syntax, I have to use double quotes, like:

global shell ""C:\Program Files\Ghostscript\bin\gswin64c.exe""

Possibly, you should code it like:

 
 shell ""C:\Program Files\cURL\bin\curl.exe" blah blah"

Give it a try.

[William Blackmon]

Yes, this solved it! I had some weird characters that were apparently confusing Stata, but the double quotes fixed it.

Thanks much!