Creating log files explicitly

Creating log files explicitly#

We start by describing how to explicitly generate log files as part of the statistical processing code.

Stata

global logdir "${rootdir}/logs"
cap mkdir "$logdir"
local c_date = c(current_date)
local cdate = subinstr("`c_date'", " ", "_", .)
local c_time = c(current_time)
local ctime = subinstr("`c_time'", ":", "_", .)
local globallog = "$logdir/logfile_`cdate'-`ctime'-`c(username)'.log"
log using "`globallog'", name(global) replace text

How to potentially do this automatically at each start, see Stata manual.

R

# This will only log output ("stdout") and warnings/messages ("stderr"), but not the commands themselves!

logfile.name <- paste0("logfile_", Sys.Date(),"-",format(as.POSIXct(Sys.time()), format = "%H_%M"),"-",Sys.info()["user"], ".log")
globallog    <- file(file.path(rootdir,logfile.name), open = "wt")
# Send output to logfile
sink(globallog, split=TRUE)
sink(globallog, type = "message")

## revert output back to the console 
sink(type = "message")
sink()
close(globallog)

MATLAB

% The "diary" function should achieve this. Not a MATLAB expert!

Python

% The logging module should achieve this.
import logging
logging.warning('Watch out!')

will output

WARNING:root:Watch out!

While some software (Stata, MATLAB) will create log files that contain commands and output, others (R, Python) will create log files that contain only output.