[Gretl-devel] append and sleep

[Allin Cottrell]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007, Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza wrote:

> You may see my problem in the script below. The function tries 
> to linearize automatically a list os series (interpolate missing 
> observations and correct outliers) trough TRAMO. (It is not 
> finished yet as it has some problems with missing data and 
> unadjusted series). Gretl processes the line "append" some 
> miliseconds before the previous Windows command has finished...

Ah, I see.  But in that context you'd be better off with a flag to 
make the shell command execute synchronously, i.e. for gretl to 
wait just as long as is needed for the shell command to complete.
(This might have some relevance to Sven's project too.)

Since we don't want to try parsing gretl-specific flags out of a 
"! <do stuff>" line, which might contain similar-looking flags 
intended for an external program, this would probably have to take 
the form of a "set" command.  For example "set shell sync" (with 
"set shell async" to turn it off), or perhaps "set shell_sync 
{on|off}".

Allin.