Question: UNIX SAS under the batch mode

[bigbigben]

Hi, guys:

There is a weird problem I run into when I run SAS on a unix server under the batch mode. The code runs perfectly under the interactive mode, but the batch mode create some extra spaces between words, which causes trouble.

There is a line in my code to read a dataset whose name are pre-specified by some macro variable. For example, I have a macro variable xx1=NewYork

The line of code is

                        data xxx; set tmp.&xx1._out; run;

The SAS code after parsing the macro variable turns out to be

                          data xxx; set tmp.NewYork _out;run;

In my case, NewYork_out is supposed to be a single dataset under the directory of tmp; however, the system read NewYork and _out as two separate words and search tmp.NewYork and work._out separately.

Have any of you encountered similar problems?

Thanks for yoru input.

[Tom · Accepted solution]

Not sure why batch mode would effect this but it looks like one of two issues.

1) Macro variable XX1 actually contains one or more trailing spaces.  Try %let xx1=&xx1; to remove any leading or trailing blanks.

2) The parser is getting confused and sticking a hard token break between the macro variable and the underscore.

Try assigning to a new macro variable.

%let inds=tmp.&xx1._out;

data xxx; set &inds; run;

Or try using %unquote() function.

data xxx; set tmp.%unquote(&xx1._out); run;

[Quentin]

If you do

%put >>&xx1.<< ;

What do you see?  Do you see the extra blank at then end?  if so, I would tr %trim(), or even just:

%let xx1=&xx1;