Can I tell Stata where to store tempfiles?

[Riccardo Valboni]

Dear all,

the question I have is nothing more than that told in the title. I am currently working on a workstation of the National Statistical Office where I cannot write on C:/. Therefore, everytime Stata tries to access C:/ there are some problems. Can instruct the program to store -tempfile-s soewhere else?

Riccardo

[Joe Canner]

Riccardo,

See http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data-management/statatmp-environment-variable/.

Regards,
Joe

[Riccardo Valboni]

Thank you Joe! I will look into that. Riccardo

[Riccardo Valboni]

I just read the document Joe suggested but for some reason it didn't work. I coded

set STATATMP=H:\temp

(I also tried to enclose the path within quotes). But Stata replied with

set STATATMP not allowed; ' STATATMP' not recognized
r(199);

Note that I am working on a workstation on which I have limited rights. For instance, I cannot set the maximum amount of memory used by Stata. Can this be connected to the problem I am experiencing now or rather this is more likely to be my mistake?

Many thanks!
Riccardo

[Nick Cox]

The set here is an operating system command, not a Stata command.

[Riccardo Valboni]

Thank you Nick. I see. So, I should ask the system administrator to do that for me.

[Nick Cox]

Depends: you should able to access a command prompt, but I can't tell you what you don't know about your own set-up.

[Joe Canner]

Riccardo,

Try the shell command in Stata. If that doesn't work you might be able to change the environment variables by doing right-clicking on Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables. (This is for Windows 7, may be slightly different for earlier or later versions.) I actually found that this method worked better than using the command line.

Regards,
Joe

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Using shell you set the variable for the current session only. Using the dialog you set the variable persistently. One or another may be 'better' in a particular case.
Necessity of admin rights is also discussed here: see Microsoft's doc.
Best, Sergiy

[David Lucido]

This works for me. It should be a line in your profile.do:

global TMP = "e:\TMP"

[Riccardo Valboni]

Thank you all. Nothing worked unfortunately because on this workstation I can only access one partition - which is not C:\ unfortunately. I notified the problem to my system administrator.

[Richard Williams]

I would hope you have access to some sort of drive you can write to. Otherwise, how do you save anything, e.g. A Word document you have written? I suspect you just aren't using the right drives or folders. You might see if any of the advice in this document can be adapted to your purposes: http://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statsin...a/ndstata.html

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Thank you all. Nothing worked unfortunately because on this workstation I can only access one partition - which is not C:\ unfortunately. I notified the problem to my system administrator.

In this case it is likely that ALL the users of the system are having the same problem. In that case Stata is just not functional on that system, and it is a definitely a ticket to the administrator.

Best, Sergiy.

[Riccardo Valboni]

I would hope you have access to some sort of drive you can write to. Otherwise, how do you save anything, e.g. A Word document you have written? I suspect you just aren't using the right drives or folders. You might see if any of the advice in this document can be adapted to your purposes: http://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statsin...a/ndstata.html

Thanks a lot Richard. Tomorrow, I will try your mystata.do. Yes, I can write on the partition to which I have access. Basically, I have reading rights to some data folders and reading and writing rights to one specific partition. In this way, I can copy data in my partition and work on it. However, Stata cannot connect to the internet and I cannot view the C:\ folder to modify files such as profile.do. Every time I need a package I have to contact the system administrator who stores it in a directory that Stata can read (he modified the profile.do accordingly). Do you think one of the first three lines of your mystata.do will tell Stata to save

In this case it is likely that ALL the users of the system are having the same problem. In that case Stata is just not functional on that system, and it is a definitely a ticket to the administrator.

Best, Sergiy.

Yes, I agree with you Sergiy. These working conditions slow you down and make you lose the desire to experiment.

[Richard Williams]

For people who don't want to bother reading through everything on my page, the key idea is that you create a file called mystata.do that is located on a network drive you have read/write access to, e.g. N:. Then, when you start Stata you give a command like

run N:\mystata

mystata.do has lines like

* These commands personalize your Stata directories.
* You need to create these directories first.
sysdir set OLDPLACE N:\ado
sysdir set PERSONAL N:\ado\personal
sysdir set PLUS N:\ado\plus

I think this would solve some of the problems Riccardo says he has, e.g. can't download packages himself. (Although if he doesn't have internet access I guess he'll still have to find some way to get the files downloaded.)

However I don't understand the problems Riccardo initially reported. If Stata can't write temporary files somewhere then how does it run at all? The people with the superhuman powers over the machine need to be consulted.