topic Re: Automation Help - Parsing the most recent file in a folder in SAS Programming

Automation Help - Parsing the most recent file in a folder

Mahesh_K — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:51:54 GMT

I would be grateful if someone could help automate the task of a weekly job that I need to run every Monday.

There are about 10 different files that an existing piece of code reads. All of these files are in a folder say D:\SASFILES.

The issue is the file is dumped into this folder and the folder also has all historical dumps of the file. The latest file is identified by the latest time stamp.

Below is an example of one of the files "MEM122-ALI-FamilySnapShotExtract". The folder contains these files:

MEM122-ALI-FamilySnapShotExtract_2009-02-16-07-34-32.txt
MEM122-ALI-FamilySnapShotExtract_2009-02-23-05-35-26.txt
MEM122-ALI-FamilySnapShotExtract_2009-03-02-05-29-14.txt

The latest file is MEM122-ALI-FamilySnapShotExtract_2009-03-02-05-29-14.txt i.e. that was created on 2nd March 2009.

I want to be able to set a variable say D121SA to point to this file

e.g.

%LET D121SA = MEM122-ALI-FamilySnapShotExtract_2009-03-02-05-29-14.txt ;

Any help appreciated!

Re: Automation Help - Parsing the most recent file in a folder

Patrick — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:57:27 GMT

Do you know what datepart the timestamp part of the filename you want to read has when you run the code - or is this something you would have to determine as well (i.e. by reading the file with the most current date)?

Re: Automation Help - Parsing the most recent file in a folder

FredrikE — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:16:23 GMT

Something like this might be a start:

filename test pipe 'dir /OD';

data _null_;
infile test;
length a $2000;
input a;
if _n_ = 1 then put a=;
run;

//Fredrik

Re: Automation Help - Parsing the most recent file in a folder

Mahesh_K — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:58:01 GMT

The timestamp is included in the file name

e.g. _2009-02-16-07-34-32.txt

Alternatively, it could also be the latest file in the directory.

Re: Automation Help - Parsing the most recent file in a folder

Patrick — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:06:51 GMT

Thanks Proccontents.
I was just going to write an answer before I read your post.

http://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.soft-sys.sas/browse_thread/thread/382ea2336c72e44/190b2aef220ffffa?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=mahesh#190b2aef220ffffa