topic Re: Output records longer than 32767 bytes in SAS on UNIX? in SAS Programming

Output records longer than 32767 bytes in SAS on UNIX?

jimbarbour — Sun, 21 May 2017 15:19:18 GMT

I'm creating some plain text (ASCII) records in a SAS data step. I'm running in a UNIX/SAS 9.4/SAS EG 7.1 environment. When I string everything together, some of these records are over 100,000 bytes long. UNIX can handle records of that length, but as I recall (and confirmed by what testing I have so far done), SAS has a constraint of no more than 32767 bytes in an output record.

Is there some kind of workaround such that I can create output records longer than 32767 bytes?

Thank you,

Jim

Re: Output records longer than 32767 bytes in SAS on UNIX?

Reeza — Sun, 21 May 2017 15:46:31 GMT

The LRECL option doesn't override this? The docs say the maximum is 1G under Unix but I don't know what that actually means.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/hostunx/69602/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p0upngkius4n84n17wt1u5znj2de.htm

Edit: The SAS 'constraint' is just the default value, not an actual constraint.

Re: Output records longer than 32767 bytes in SAS on UNIX?

art297 — Sun, 21 May 2017 15:44:56 GMT

On your file statement just include the lrecl option (e.g., file the_output_filename lrecl=999999;)

Art, CEO, AnalystFinder.com

Re: Output records longer than 32767 bytes in SAS on UNIX?

LinusH — Sun, 21 May 2017 19:04:11 GMT

When you say "string together" do you mean as in one SAS variable? Then the maximum is as you say 32K.
Then the work around is not to string together but output your data from different variables.

Re: Output records longer than 32767 bytes in SAS on UNIX?

jimbarbour — Mon, 22 May 2017 00:37:59 GMT

Thank you to all three of you. All three of you are right. I'm going to mark @art297's answer as the solution since it is the most specific in terms of a fix, but all three of you deserve credit, and I thank you.

@LinusH, I was aware of the 32767 byte limit for a single variable. I was confused in thinking that 32767 was a hard constraint for the the LRECL. Simply setting a value for the LRECL parameter as suggested by @art297 took care of that (I already had multiple 32767 length character variables set up to handle the data).

Easiest fix. Ever. Thank you, again.

Jim