Question

In R, I can run another R script using

source("script.R")

How can I do the same in Stata?

Answer 1

In Stata, there are two types of scripts:

1. There are do-files, which are sequences of the commands as you type them, which may contain pretty much anything,
   and
2. There are ado-files, which are self-contained program scripts. Ado stands for “Automatically loaded DO files”.

The primary distinction is that to execute the do-file, you need to do it or run it:

do whatever.do

shows the output, and

run whatever.do

suppresses the output.

The automatically loaded do-files, as the name implies, are loaded automatically. When you type

blah blah1 blah2

Stata will first look for the program blah in its memory. If it is not there, it will look for file blah.ado in the subdirectories identified in its adopath that by default includes Stata’s own directories, as well as the current directory (type adopath to find out more, if you are interested). If it finds this blah.ado, it will (1) make sure it has program define blah inside it, and (2) try to execute this program with whatever arguments you supplied (blah1 blah2). If it fails to find the file blah.ado anywhere, it will issue an error message:

   . blah blah1 blah2
   unrecognized command:  blah
   r(199);