Step 2: Path names and case

Two issues:

• Windows computers use \ (backslashes) in path names, while Mac and Linux computers use / (forward slashes). The use of \ (backslashes) in path names breaks code on Mac and Linux computers.

• Windows and Mac computers use case-insensitive file systems, while Linux computers use case-sensitive file systems.

Both of these issues need to be addressed. You are helped by a straightforward but often forgotten (or unknown) observation:

• Every statistical programming language can use generic path names using / (forward slashes). This ensures wide reproducibility.

About 40% of replication packages in economics appear to be submitted by researchers using computers running MacOS or Linux. With a bit of simplified math, if we believe that is representative of what future replicators will do, that means that 40% of users will not be able to run 60% of replication packages without some potentially widespread edits, because of those backslashes.

You should thus replace all path names in your code to use / (forward slashes), or appropriate functions, and take care to write case-sensitive file and path names. This is straightforward:

Stata

// Instead of
use "data\analysis\combined_data.dta", clear
// Use
use "data/analysis/combined_data.dta", clear
// or better
use "$rootdir/data/analysis/combined_data.dta", clear

R

# Instead of
data <- read.csv("data\\analysis\\combined_data.csv")
# Use
data <- read.csv("data/analysis/combined_data.csv")
# or better
data <- read.csv(file.path(rootdir, "data", "analysis", "combined_data.csv"))

and similarly for other languages.

Implementing

In many cases, you can just globally replace all \ with / in your code files. Caution however is warranted if your code explicitly writes out $LaTeX$ code, which also (legitimately) uses \. In that case, you will need to be more careful.

Expert tip

If using a (Bash or Zsh) terminal, you likely have the sed command available. You can use it to replace all backslashes with forward slashes in all .do files in the code directory as follows:

sed -i 's+\\+/+g' code/*.do