cf viewing

[Dan Gross]

Hello,
I am trying to compare my output of a large amount of stata files to one someone else created using the "cf" command. I added the verbose suffix in an attempt to view the distinct changes between the observations, but the only thing that it gave me was the difference in number of observations between the two data files. As of now my code looks like this:

use "filepath"
cf varlist using "filepath 2", verbose

But I can't seem to track the individual changes. I was hoping to view them so I could fix them to make the two outputs match perfectly but to no avail. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[Cyrus Levy]

cf _all using "filepath 2", verbose all

The above line should give you a complete list of changes and matched ones observation by observation for all variables.

[Dan Gross]

Ok so I tried this, and it gave me "master has 4307 obs., using 4237" and nothing else, would this imply that I just have 70 extra observations, and that all of the other ones match, or something else?

[Cyrus Levy]

Exactly. All variables' all observations match. But there are some missing observations in the using data.

[Rich Goldstein]

actually, I don't believe that is correct; I think that if the number of observations differ, then the program stops and does NOT compare the files at all; you can check this by:

view cf.ado, adopath

and looking at the code (of course, this is not my code and I may be mis-interpreting the code)