The gretl package includes the command-line program gretlcli. This is essentially an updated version of Ramu Ramanathan's ESL. On unix-like systems it can be run from the console, or in an xterm (or similar). Under MS Windows it can be run in a "DOS box". gretlcli has its own help file, which may be accessed by typing "help" at the prompt. It can be run in batch mode, sending outout directly to a file (see the Section called gretlcli in Chapter 9 above).
If gretlcli is linked to the readline library (this is automatically the case in the MS Windows version; also see Appendix B), the command line is recallable and editable, and offers command completion. You can use the Up and Down arrow keys to cycle through previously typed commands. On a given command line, you can use the arrow keys to move around, in conjunction with Emacs editing keystokes.[1] The most common of these are:
where "Ctrl-a" means press the "a" key while the "Ctrl" key is also depressed. Thus if you want to change something at the beginning of a command, you don't have to backspace over the whole line, erasing as you go. Just hop to the start and add or delete characters.
If you type the first letters of a command name then press the Tab key, readline will attempt to complete the command name for you. If there's a unique completion it will be put in place automatically. If there's more than one completion, pressing Tab a second time brings up a list.
Command scripts developed for Ramanathan's original ESL should be usable with gretlcli with few or no changes: the only things to watch for are multi-line commands and the freq command.
In ESL, a semicolon is used as a terminator for many commands. I decided to remove this in gretlcli. Semicolons are simply ignored, apart from a few special cases where they have a definite meaning: as a separator for two lists in the ar and tsls commands, and as a marker for an unchanged starting or ending observation in the smpl command. In ESL semicolon termination gives the possibility of breaking long commands over more than one line; in gretlcli this is done by putting a trailing backslash \ at the end of a line that is to be continued.
With freq, you can't at present specify user-defined ranges as in ESL. A chi-square test for normality has been added to the output of this command.
Note also that the command-line syntax for running a batch job is simplified. For ESL you typed, e.g.
esl -b datafile < inputfile > outputfilewhile for gretlcli you type:
gretlcli -b inputfile > outputfileThe inputfile is treated as a program argument; it should specify a datafile to use internally, using the syntax open datafile or the special comment (* ! datafile *)
[1] | Actually, the key bindings shown below are only the defaults; they can be customized. See the readline manual. |