I have a number of SAS programs that run over night and start with a series of x or %sysexec Windows shell commands that copy binary data files off of a server, invoke a program at the command line to export them into plain text, manipulate the plain text data files into fully-formatted SAS datasets, then grab related pdfs for each dataset and move them to a new location, using SAS to create a running table of where the PDFs land and which PDFs are related to which output SAS datasets. Imagine 3 or 4 nightly commands that loop simple commands like the following anywhere from 6 to 30 times each:
proc printto log = "C:\Users\Cghost\Logs";
run;
%let server = \\network-share\;
%let datafiles = datasetname;
%sysexec xcopy /E "&server.&datafiles." "&localcopy.&datafiles." /Y;
x """C:\Program Files (x86)\DataPackage\Bin\Conversion.exe"" ""&localcopy.&datafiles.\ExportData_&datafiles..conv""";
I log all this using proc printto, but obviously I don't see errors or outcomes (i.e., "File copied successfully") from the command shell, so this is leaving me unaware when a file is not copied correctly for some reason or when there's an error invoking the program used to convert the proprietary binary data files to plain text. So my question is, how can I grab this information back into SAS, and more specifically, what's the best way to do so? Is there a way to pull the result text from the command shell directly back into my SAS log so that I can see the results there? Or will I need to store it as a separate file (and if so, how can I append to the same daily log file for each time I invoke x or sysexec)?
