You need to trim the values passed to the TRANWRD() function since SAS stores variables as fixed length.  You asked tranwrd to find values with many trailing spaces that are probably not actually in the values. linux_folder1 = tranwrd(folder1,trim(folder2),trim(linux));   ... View more

@Quentin you are right, of course. The proper way to use the sleep function is this: %let sleep_until='10jul2017:14:30:00'dt; data _null_; sleeptime = &sleep_until - time(); slept = sleep(sleeptime,1); run; as this forces sleep() to use seconds as the unit across all platforms. Or %let sleep_until='10jul2017:14:30:00'dt; data _null_; sleeptime = &sleep_until - time(); call sleep(sleeptime,1); run; ... View more