topic Re: Reference folder in a libname in SAS Programming

Reference folder in a libname

CathyVI — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 19:49:39 GMT

Hi,

I have a folder with two levels. The first level has 20 second level folders. I have sasfiles in each of the second level and will like to create a single libname for them. How do I do that?

For example:

First level folder : /_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS

Second level folder : /_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS/data1/a.sas7bdat

/_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS/data2/b.sas7bdat

/_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS/data3/c.sas7bdat

/_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS/data4/d.sas7bdat

When I write a libname to reference all the second level files using the

libname x "/_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS"; run;

its not working and I do not want to go through the pain of writing 20 libnames and putting all the libref in another single libname or is that what I have to do?

Re: Reference folder in a libname

ballardw — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 20:31:30 GMT

Note: BDAT files should not be part of a "libname" they are the data sets.

A libname statement to reference multiple folders needs to list them. One way is below. Note the ( ) around the list.

libname x ("/_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS/data1" "/_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS/data2"
           "/_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS/data3" "/_U/N/RC/Proj/SAS/data4" 
          );

another would be assign a different libname to each folder and then create composite library. Assuming you created libraries named Lib1 through lib4 , one for each folder. Then the library All would include all of them.

libname all (lib1 lib2 lib3 lib4);

Caution: duplicate data set names in multiple folders will be difficult to work with.