topic Re: Opening and closing terminals with an "X statement"? (Or not opening them at all?) in SAS Programming

Opening and closing terminals with an "X statement"? (Or not opening them at all?)

Schwa — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 22:05:28 GMT

Hello, new-ish SAS user.

The trouble I'm having is this: whenever I need to use a lot of "X statements" (I don't know the proper terminology for this), for instance I need to create a bunch of folders in some directory, SAS opens a terminal for each and I have to shut it down manually, and I'd of course like to avoid this. There's obviously something I'm missing here.

For example, I want to make a bunch of folders folder1, folder2... folder100 within path C:\PATH. Here's the code I would use:

x "dir c:\PATH";

%macro makedirs;

%do i=1 %to 100;

x "md folder&i";

%end;

%mend makedirs;

%makedirs

The problem is, I'm going to have to manually shut down 100 windows, when this should actually take no time at all. I've tried adding lines like:

x "exit";

but to no avail. How do I avoid this? Really, how do I tell SAS not to open a terminal window at all?

Re: Opening and closing terminals with an "X statement"? (Or not opening them at all?)

Schwa — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 23:04:00 GMT

I'm using Windows 10, by the way.

Re: Opening and closing terminals with an "X statement"? (Or not opening them at all?)

Reeza — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 23:13:30 GMT

You have at least three options that I see:

Use the NoXSYNC/noxwait option.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/hostwin/69955/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n0xwt90ik8vxdrn13708w6n3nm4o.htm

option noxwait;

Use SAS base libname trick to create folders

You can use the LIBNAME and DLCREATEDIR option.

https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2013/07/02/use-dlcreatedir-to-create-folders/

Note that there's a LIBNAME function so that you don't need a macro here either.

Use the DCREATE() function to create a directory

http://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lefunctionsref&docsetTarget=p1aj29pf4cxnirn15q5hmf0tv438.htm&docsetVersion=9.4&locale=en

I'm more in favour of one of the latter options because they will work on most systems without being changed and because they don't need macro code. X commands are commonly locked down on many installations.

Re: Opening and closing terminals with an "X statement"? (Or not opening them at all?)

Schwa — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 18:04:14 GMT

Thanks! I ended up using the DLCREATEDIR option, works like a charm!