Stata 16 - remove "Stata" default folder

[abhishek dev]

Stata 16 creates a "Stata" folder in the Documents folder whenever it starts. I want to change the settings so that the folder is not created. I am running Stata/MP 16.0 for Mac (64-bit Intel)

[William Lisowski]

Welcome to Statalist.

You have made an interesting observation that I had not noticed, because for my own purposes I had created ~/Documents/Stata long ago to hold Stata-related documents.

In the Getting Started with Stata for Mac PDF included with your Stata installation, I found the following.

B.1 Executing commands every time Stata is started

Stata looks for the file profile.do when it is invoked and, if it finds it, executes the commands in it. Stata looks for profile.do first in the directory where Stata is installed, then in the current directory, then along your path, and finally along the ado-path (see [P] sysdir). We recommend that you put profile.do in ~/Documents/Stata.

Interesting that their advice is to put your profile.do in a directory that it does not say is included among those searched.