Submitting a program to run in SAS® should return the same results whether it runs as a background job, runs interactively, or is submitted using SAS® Enterprise Guide® (or SAS® Studio). You might experience a situation where this does not appear to be the case and wonder what is happening. Remember that in each scenario, you are running a SAS session that is configured by its option settings. While the standard configuration options for the SAS session are likely the same, the individual SAS clients might contain specific option settings.
These option settings can be affected by pre-code submitted by the SAS client or options settings that are controlled by preferences within the client. Option settings that can affect results are FMTERR/NOFMTERR and VALIDVARNAME=. If you are seeing differences in programs that are submitted using different methods, you might want to issue a PROC OPTIONS statement to compare the settings between the two environments. You can even specify which options you want to see and add the VALUE parameter to display the value as well as how/where the value was set.
For example:
proc options option=fmterr value;
run;
