topic Re: capture a text file's modified date time in SAS Programming

capture a text file's modified date time

xiaobin — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 16:10:42 GMT

Hello,

I have a program that only needs to be executed whenever a newer data file is available. The data file is in text format. Instead of keeping a record of the older version and run a compare to find if the file is any different, I am hoping to be able to capture the modified time of the text file (so I can skip touching the data to just find out if the file has been updated). Is there a way to get the last modified time for text files through SAS?

Or are there other better/alternative approaches I could consider?

Thank you!

Xiaobin

Re: capture a text file's modified date time

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 16:21:47 GMT

Use the FINFO function

Re: capture a text file's modified date time

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 16:23:08 GMT

To do it outside SAS, on UNIX systems the make utilty can be helpful.

Re: capture a text file's modified date time

xiaobin — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 16:30:30 GMT

@Kurt_Bremser FINFO gives me exactly what I want. Thank you!!

Re: capture a text file's modified date time

HB — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 16:30:33 GMT

I think your logic is:

SAS program exists

Run program

If text input file last modified date is different than the last time this program ran

Go manipulate stuff

if not

Just quit and maybe provide a feedback message

I think that logic depends on two things, the first being what you asked which is grabbing the file date and the second being storing that date someplace to be able to compare it the next time the program is run.

I think the first part is:

filename fileref 'path\aaa.txt';                                                                                                          
data a(drop=fid);                                                                                                                       
   infile fileref truncover obs=1;                                                                                                       
   fid=fopen('fileref');                                                                                                                 
   moddate=finfo(fid,'Last Modified');                                                                                                   
run;    

proc print;                                                                                                                             
run;

This make a dataset in WORK that contains the modified date. It looks like 12Jan2017:10:25:14.

I think then if you wrote that dataset out to a text file to store that date, when you ran your program again you could grab the incoming date, compare to the written out date, and logically see where you wanted to go.

HTH.