topic Re: Listing Files in a directory in SAS Programming

Listing Files in a directory

jacksonan123 — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 13:29:46 GMT

I found this code for listing directories at:http://support.sas.com/kb/24/820.html

filename DIRLIST pipe 'dir "C:\Documents and Settings" /s';

data dirlist ;
     length buffer $256 ;

     infile dirlist length=reclen ;

     input buffer $varying256. reclen ;
run ;

However I get the following error when I insert my path. I am using SAS UE so I am certain that I should have access to my folders.

Can someone tell me why this occurs and how to overcome the issue?

OPTIONS NONOTES NOSTIMER NOSOURCE NOSYNTAXCHECK;

74 filename DIRLIST pipe 'dir "folders/myfolders/aptensio_secalc/finalsas" /s';

ERROR: Insufficient authorization to access PIPE.

ERROR: Error in the FILENAME statement.

76 data dirlist ;

77 length buffer $256 ;

79 infile dirlist length=reclen ;

81 input buffer $varying256. reclen ;

82 run ;

ERROR: No logical assign for filename DIRLIST.

NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors.

WARNING: The data set WORK.DIRLIST may be incomplete. When this step was stopped there were 0 observations and 1 variables.

NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time):

real time 0.02 seconds

cpu time 0.00 seconds

Re: Listing Files in a directory

Kurt_Bremser — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 14:23:47 GMT

To be able to use filename pipe, XCMD needs to be enabled, which is not the case out-of-the-box in a SAS BI Server setup.

You need to ask your SAS administrator do enable this on the workspace server yo are using.

Re: Listing Files in a directory

jacksonan123 — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 14:58:49 GMT

I am using SAS University edition so I guess the question is it possible to
enable XCMD with SAS UE in order to use filename pipe?

I looked on the help site at
https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Procedures/How-to-enable-XCMD-in-SAS-Univ
ersity-Edition/td-p/265868 and it can't be done on SAS UE.

Thanks for your response.

Re: Listing Files in a directory

Kurt_Bremser — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 17:58:29 GMT

You can do it with SAS means:

data files (keep=fname);
rc = filename("mydir","/folders/myfolders");
did = dopen("mydir");
if did > 0
then do i = 1 to dnum(did);
  fname = dread(did,i);
  output;
end;
rc = dclose(did);
run;

Further SAS means (fopen, foptnum, foptname, finfo) can be used to retrieve details of files.