Stata Preflight

Stata Pre-flight

Before running or finishing edits to any .do file, run these checks. The user's Stata username is <your-stata-username> (Stata base path /Users/<your-username>/).

1. Username path branch

Every do-file needs a <your-stata-username> branch in its path-setting block:

grep -L "<your-stata-username>" path/to/file.do

If the file is listed (no match), the path block is missing the user's branch and the script will fail silently on this machine. Add a branch like:

if "`c(username)'" == "<your-stata-username>" {
    global root "/Users/<your-username>/.../<project>"
}

2. No cap around esttab

grep -nE "(^|[^a-z])cap(ture)?[[:space:]]+esttab" path/to/file.do

Any hit must be unwrapped. cap esttab silently drops in-memory estimates, producing empty tables. Same goes for cap est store chains that feed esttab.

3. Log file declared

Confirm the do-file opens a log:

grep -nE "^log using" path/to/file.do

If missing, add one near the top so failures leave a diagnosable trail.

4. After running

• Verify *.log was produced and mtime is recent.
• Open the tail of the log and confirm no r(xxx); errors before declaring success.
• If using esttab, confirm the output .tex/.csv was actually written and has content.

Reporting

Report each check as PASS/FAIL. If anything is FAIL, do not run the script — fix first.