[Clyde Schechter]

But, as a rule, I avoid writing paths by hand because it is error prone. I typically copy and paste any path either from the terminal or from the file explorer.

I definitely agree. That's my practice as well.

In Windows I find it is a little easier to fill in a second backslash than it is to change a backslash to a forward slash.

But, assuming you are working in a do file, wouldn't it be just as easy, or easier, to do a find and replace all in selection?

[Hemanshu Kumar]

So I use double backslashes, and don't spend much time worrying what will happen if I ever have to move the script over to Linux and run it someday.

I guess everyone's needs vary. I often end up sharing code with co-authors or RAs who might be on a different OS than mine. So I really value coding practices that make the code run right out of the box on different machines.

[wbuchanan]

https://wbuchanan.github.io/stataConference2020-readit Just figured I'd leave this here since it dealt with making this specific situation much easier to deal with.

[Kendal zhang]

https://wbuchanan.github.io/stataConference2020-readit Just figured I'd leave this here since it dealt with making this specific situation much easier to deal with.

I'm sorry, it makes me a little confused.

[wbuchanan]

Kendal zhang the program I wrote and discussed in the slides I referenced addresses your issue to read multiple files at once that need to be appended without using tempfiles or having to do any other work. More importantly, it works with many different file types and mixed file types as long as the files are all in the same directory, or can be discovered by recursion through subdirectories.