On Wed, 23 Sep 2009, Alan G Isaac wrote: > On 9/23/2009 2:47 PM, Allin Cottrell wrote: > > One could fairly easily write a shell > > command to preprocess the data and execute it via "!<shell>" > > in gretl. > > Sure, but I'm trying to help students get IFS data into gretl. > They have been generally encouraged to use CSV files, so I'm > trying to give them gretl-based instructions for getting IFS > produced CSV files into gretl.
Gretl-based instructions are not necessarily exclusive of shell commands, since (a) gretl can do shell, and (b) the shell is capable of more flexible manipulation of text files than gretl can ever be (more so on *nix than Windows, of course, but even on Windows). For example, if you want to discard the first 6 lines of a data file, data.csv, on Windows, in gretl script/console: ! more +6 data.csv > gretldata.csv open gretldata.csv There's little point in trying to have gretl reinvent shell processing. (With spreadsheet files, which are not plain text and hence cannot easily be manipulated via the shell, we try to be accommodating.) Allin Cottrell
