SAS hangs at "ERROR: Undetermined I/O failure." Can I get it to quit instead of hang?

[ajs_rdg]

SAS 9.3 on Windows Server 2003 (yes, I know, will be moving to 2012 soon).

I have a Windows scheduled task that executes a SAS job to collect some data and append it to a data set.

Most of the time it works fine. Occasionally it fails, pops up a window (even though it's running in noninteractive mode) showing "ERROR: Undetermined I/O failure." and just waits forever for me to close the window. And while it's in that state, later scheduled executions can't happen.

Well, I don't care if it fails once in a while. I just want it to abort instead of hang, so the next scheduled run will run. Is there a way of getting that behaviour?

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

Options errorabend; at the start of the program MIGHT work. It may be that what you are getting is an OS error and not a SAS error, in which case SAS may not be able to determine it is in an error condition.

Note that errorabend will also terminate for other errors, so use carefully.

[ajs_rdg]

Thanks, ballardw and scmebu. Options errorabend; worked so well that I never got around to trying -unbuflog.

The frequency of the job hanging dropped sharply.

Remaining hangs were attributable not to SAS itself but to curl (called from the SAS job) waiting forever. Using curl option --max-time took care of that nicely.

I also moved to from SAS 9.3 to 9.4 and Windows Server 2003 to 2012 at the same time, though that didn't seem to make any difference itself.

[scmebu]

Also, try using the -unbuflog option when running SAS on this job.  If there's a crash and traceback information that's being lost when SAS hangs then this might ensure that information gets written to the log.