Transferring SAS files from z/OS mainframe to UNIX

[tomcmacdonald]

Is it possible to do this without using PROC CIMPORT and PROC CPORT?  I'm getting this error:

ERROR: Unrecognized or unsupported transport file format.

And I'm at a loss as to why. 

[Tom]

You cannot just copy a SAS binary file (like a dataset or a catalog) from IBM mainframe to some other operating system.

First you need to use PROC CPORT on the mainframe to create transport file.

Copy that file as a BINARY file to the target system using whatever transfer method you have.

You can then use PROC CIMPORT to convert the transport file back into normal SAS datasets or catalogs.

For source code you can just transfer the files as TEXT using whatever transfer method you use.  That way the transfer will convert the text from EBCDIC to ASCII so that it will be readable.

[Kurt_Bremser]

I can confirm that CPORT/CIMPORT works for this task. We transferred all our DW data from z/OS to AIX using this method. Make sure that the CPORT files are created on the MF with the correct file format parameters. After transmitting as binary, they were perfectly usable on the UNIX system.