You shouldn't be trying to read or write anything using the root node of your Unix file system, but perhaps that is just a simplied example for posting the question?   I also noticed that your sample CSV file does NOT have a line with the column names. If that is true then make sure to tell PROC IMPORT that it needs to generates names by itself.   Also make sure that the name of your physical file is in all lowercase letters.  The directory name part can contain mixed upper and lowercase letters but the membername part of the filename must be all lowercase.  For example you could use "~/MySASData/example1" as the name and SAS would create the dataset EXAMPLE1 using the physical file name of 'example1.sas7bdat' in the 'MySASData' directory under your home directory.   If those don't fix the issue then I think that most likely your problem is that PROC IMPORT is not flexible enough to use a quoted physical name as the name for the output dataset.  Perhaps if you just use this simple trick you can get it to work?   OPTIONS NOFMTERR ; %let table=%sysget(v1); %let outfil=%sysget(v2); * Make an empty dataset to create the SYSLAST automatic variable; data "&outfil"; run; proc import out=&syslast replace datafile="&table" dbms=csv ; getnames=no; run; ... View more