Doc, I have to rephrase your initial statement. If you risk losing any data then my suggestion should NOT be used. But, seriously, there are so many times when that risk simply doesn't exist. Our overused sashelp.class provides a perfect example. Would it make any difference to merge a file, on name, if a 2nd file only has a length of 7? No! The longest name in the file only has seven characters while the length is 8. Similarly, would one lose any data merging that same file on, say, height or weight, if the other file had different lengths? Miy point is simply that it is more important to know your data than it is to make sure that the variable lengths are the same.
... View more