[Gretl-users] Cannot open session file

[Allin Cottrell]

On Wed, 23 May 2007, Max Bölhoff wrote:

> When I first started using gretl last autumn I had an issue that 
> one day I could no more open the session file of a project I had 
> been working on over the course of several days. Now, with 
> version 1.6.5 (Windows), exactly the same has happened again, 
> and when I look through the files in the Documents and Settings 
> folder as well as the one where I saved the session file, only 
> the latter has actually been saved when I last did so, but the 
> supporting files in the Documents and Settings folder are old 
> and imcomplete, meaning that several save commands have failed?! 

There was a substantial change in the mechanism for saving 
sessions with gretl version 1.6.0 of September 2006.  In the 
current setup there should be no "supporting files" lying around 
separately.  There should be a single .gretl file, which is 
actually a zip archive, containing "session.xml" among other 
files.  

If you have a .gretl file that won't open, could you please send 
me a copy?

It's a known issue that current gretl will not properly handle 
session files that were saved using gretl 1.5.1 or earlier, 
although in this case it will likely be possible to recover the 
session.  The old .gretl file is a script.  If one renames it as 
an .inp file and opens it as a script, then (perhaps with a little 
editing) it should do the job of rebuilding the session.

Allin Cottrell