topic Re: How to check if a folder is empty in SAS Programming

How to check if a folder is empty

Arjumand — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 10:34:01 GMT

Hi,

I need the code to check whether the directory is empty in sas macro.

Re: How to check if a folder is empty

RW9 — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 10:40:47 GMT

Please note this is a Q&A board, not a contract work request system. If you have a question, provide what you have done, show example code using the {i}. If you have access to the command line then doing a filename tmp pipe 'dir c:\test /b'; and using that in a datastep then checking that might work. Not sure what the benefit of checking for an empty directory is though, doesn't really add anything. Do you want to check existence of the folder, or maybe a file you don't want to overwrite?

Re: How to check if a folder is empty

ChrisBrooks — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 10:51:09 GMT

This should work

%macro isemptyfolder(folder);

	%let filrf=mydir;
	%let rc=%sysfunc(filename(filrf, "&folder"));
	%let did=%sysfunc(dopen(&filrf));
	%let memcount=%sysfunc(dnum(&did));
	%let rc=%sysfunc(dclose(&did));
	%put 'number of members in folder ' &folder ' = ' &memcount;

%mend isemptyfolder;

Re: How to check if a folder is empty

Arjumand — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 11:57:49 GMT

Hi @RW9: Thanks for your reply. Just for the info, I am not actually doing any project but making myself more familiar with macro programming. I was actually writing a UNIX shell script which had certain validations and thought for the same in SAS.