Possible issue with "groups" command in StataNew 18.5 for Windows?

[David Winter]

Dear Colleagues. The University of Birmingham has StataNew/SE 18.5 for Windows (64.bit x86-64) available for Staff and Students. This morning an update was available to run on my PC which I subsequently executed. I am testing some scripts from a colleague in Edinburgh (currently on long-term leave and unavailable so I cannot check her version). She included the 'groups' command in a script, which has failed with the message: "command groups is unrecognized". From within StataNew a check on: "help groups" returns "help for groups not found", and "findit groups" returns nothing. An internet search for "groups command in StataNew" returns several posts from Nick Cox but nothing I could identify that indicates 'groups' is non-standard and requires loading additional packages (from ssc) or ado files. Any advice gratefully received... Thanks. Dave.

[Nick Cox]

groups is mine and downloadable from the Stata Journal website. I chose a common English word as a command name, mischievously, as at some point StataCorp laid claim to all the words in the English language as potential command names.

Any way, here is an otherwise unpredictable way to find information on it without many false positive hits. (Searching Statalist might hit the same problem.)

. search st0496, entry

Search of official help files, FAQs, Examples, and Stata Journals

SJ-18-1 st0496_1  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Software update for groups
        (help groups if installed)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  N. J. Cox
        Q1/18   SJ 18(1):291
        groups exited with an error message if weights were specified;
        this has been corrected

SJ-17-3 st0496  . . . . .  Speaking Stata: Tables as lists: The groups command
        (help groups if installed)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  N. J. Cox
        Q3/17   SJ 17(3):760--773
        presents command for listing group frequencies and percents and
        cumulations thereof; for various subsetting and ordering by
        frequencies, percents, and so on; for reordering of columns;
        and for saving tabulated data to new datasets

There is no reason to suppose that groups would run if you do not have it installed accessibly. I can't think of a reason why StataNow would pose distinctive problems here. The same kind of problem could easily occur if your colleague made use of other community-contributed commands.

[David Winter]

Many thanks to Nick Cox. A colleague also pointed out that it is available from "ssc install groups" which I could have tracked down with further digging I guess. It might be helpful to put a prompt in Stata help (e.g. "help for --- not found, have you checked ssc?")

[Nick Cox]

The suggestion in #3 is well intended, but

1. many community-contributed commands are not on SSC, but posted elsewhere (Stata Journal, GitHub, etc.)

2. in this particular case the SJ installation should please be regarded as definitive, as it comes with a paper to read and to refer to! That's precisely why I cited it and didn't mention a version on SSC.

[David Winter]

The points by Nick are well made - perhaps any prompt should read: "help for --- not found, please check ssc and other community-contributed sources (e.g. Stata Journal, Git Hub etc.)"?