Data null Question

[geronimo44]

Hi community, I have come through some kind of excercises and I would much appreciate your ideas. I have also done my research in SAS documentation but I still have some questions on the following: 

What would this code do and what results could possibly return? 

data _null_;

x = sleep(2);

run;

 Thank you 

[LinusH]

Search support.sas.com for data _null_. It should give you plenty of hits.

And secondly, you have a piece of code. Please don't ask what it does - try it yourself and observe...

[PaigeMiller]

Also, the HELP documentation for the SLEEP command is extremely clear.

[geronimo44]

Thanks for the replies. Apparently I am not able to run the code cause my academic license expired and that's why I threw it in the community board. I also am aware of the Sleep functionality but since I am unable to run the code, I can't see how teh data_null connects to the sleep function.

In any case thank you for your consideration. 

[Reeza · Accepted solution]

data _null_ tells SAS not to create a data set while executing this particular data step. There is no specific connection to the sleep function. You use a Data _null_ statement in this situation to pass commands to the system that you only want to execute once.

Sleep tells it to pause between commands, usually as a safety precaution to wait for another process to finish.