Windows BATCH job log location

[Quentin]

Just noticed a surprise while doing some Windows 10 testing, but was able to replicate it on Win 7.  9.4M4.

I have a .bat which runs a batch job and does not specify a log parameter.  So the command is like:

start "" "C:\Program Files\SASHome\SASFoundation\9.4\sas.exe" -CONFIG "C:\Program Files\SASHome\SASFoundation\9.4\nls\en\sasv9.cfg" -sysin "Q:\Junk\Test.sas"

On windows 7, if I double click that .bat file, the log goes to Q:\Junk\Test.log as I would expect.  But if I right-click the .bat file and say "run as administrator", the log goes to c:\Windows\system32\Test.log.  Is this explained somewhere in the docs?

On Win 10 I can only run .bat files as administrator, and the log goes to C:\Windows\System32.  On Windows 10 I created a scheduled task with a similar command (not a .bat file), and got the same results, log written to C:\Windows\System32.  I assume the scheduled task is running as an administrator. 

It's not a problem (and probably a good idea) for me to specify the log file when I invoke SAS.  But it was a surprise to me.  I thought the default was that a batch job log was written to the same directory as the code.

[Quentin]

Looks like with the task scheduler, if I specify a directory to "start in" then the log and list will go to that location, even if I don't pass the directory as parameters in the command.

[ballardw]

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@Quentin wrote:

Looks like with the task scheduler, if I specify a directory to "start in" then the log and list will go to that location, even if I don't pass the directory as parameters in the command.

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Isn't Windoze wonderful?!

I wouldn't be surprised if this behavior changes in Windoze11, 12, ...

I think I would go to the extra minor work to add log output to the jobs.