convince SAS to "see" hidden files

[yabwon]

Hey SAS-L,

The XCMD is turned off.

Is there a way to convince SAS to, when running DREA(), DNUM() etc. functions, see hidden files too? 

Something like:

x 'DIR /A';

under Windows

or

filename f PIPE 'ls -a';

under Linux or UNIX systems,

but without OS level interaction.

All the best

Bart

[JosvanderVelden]

Hi Bart, have a look at this paper to see if it gives you ideas on how to approach your challenge: http://www8.sas.com/scholars/Proceedings/2006/Applications/AP16_06.PDF
Best regards, Jos

[yabwon]

Hi Jos,

Thanks for the article but it wont help.  It uses X statement.  And, as I wrote, I have NOXCMD.

Bart

[JosvanderVelden]

Have you seen this post? https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Delete-hidden-files/td-p/229878. It seems to have code using dread as you indicate. But like the solution indicates access to hidden files from within SAS using dread does not work. And my guess is that fdelete for a directory will result in an error because windows will not allow deletion of the hidden files in the directory. However I've seen some unexpected behaviour in some windows versions. I assume something like this will not work on a unix-based system.

[yabwon]

yes, I read that one too.

the FDELETE() will work with a hidden file, since it accepts a fileref and a fileref points to a particular object so this:

filename x "~/.test_hidden";
data _null_;
  file x;
  put "text";
run;
data _null_;
  rc = fdelete('x');
run;

will work ok (I did a test on linux)

So if you have a list of hidden files you will be able to delete them, thing is to get that list with DOPEN, DREAD, DNUM, etc.

Bart

[mkeintz]

Here's a random thought:

Does/would your system administrator permit use of some single other SAS session that allows XCMD with access to the same data storage as your sas session?  Can that session be configured as the server for a sas/connect client session on your end?

Restricting access to that server might be a way for sysadmins to maintain desired authorization restrictions, while you (as an authorized user) can have your sas/connect client use the server as a proxy for the needed xcmd actions.

[yabwon]

Hi Mark,

Well, it's not that easy.

I was thinking about a general solution, in particular this macro: https://github.com/SASPAC/baseplus/blob/main/baseplus.md#dirsandfiles-macro which is OS independent solution, with no XCMD needed, but lacks that "see hidden files" feature. 

I was hoping that there is some SAS option which I missed that allows for such a "in depth" view. Unfortunately it looks like there is no way to do it without an OS access.

Bart

[lexjansen]

Hi Bart,

Did you ever find a solution to this?

I'm trying to delete a folder structure cloned from GitHub, that contains  .gitignore and .gitkeep files.

I'm running into the same issue.

Thanks,

Lex

[yabwon]

Unfortunately I didn't find one 😞 😞

Unless you have XCMD enabled and will to run OS commands, SAS functions won't help you.

I also doubt that asking SAS for development will work... 😞

Bart

[Kurt_Bremser]

I just posted a SAS product suggestion here 

[yabwon]

Voted 👍

[lexjansen]

Thanks, Kurt!

[lexjansen]

My original use-case was being able to delete a folder structure cloned from GitHub.

I was not able to do this, because the folder structure contained hidden files like .gitkeep and .gitignore.

It turns out that the GIT_DELETE_REPO function does exactly what I was looking for.

The GIT_DELETE_REPO function deletes a specified local Git repository and all of the contents inside that repository.

And actually, the function does not seem to care whether the folder is a Git folder. It will just delete any folder structure.

data _null_;
  RC = GIT_DELETE_REPO('/home/lexjansen/dataset-json-sas');
  put RC=;
run;

[Reeza]

That's a fun workaround to delete a folder with files in it 😄