I try again:.... Warning: I have not tested this functionality lately, but last time i tried to use it I gave up. This Interface is probably the worst **bleep** SAS Institute has ever made (sorry for the Words, but this i true). I tried to get SAS to fix it With the help of my former collegue in SAS (yes, I have worked for SAS earlier for many years). After a lot of work and dokumentation we actually gave up. There was absolutely no will at SAS in Cary to even consider to do anything about it. The typicall answer from them was: "What do you expect ?". We tried to explain that we expect at least a warning or an error Message when Things do not work. But, no, we had no chance. So what is (I assume it still is) wrong With this Interface ? It Works somewhat like this: It starts an external process that Writes the data to a local file. After WAIT_MILLISECONDS (an option you can set) SAS starts Reading the local file without checking that the external fetch is done. In real world you use SFTP to fetch date from outside Your Company, and the line speed is mostly not as intenal speed. The SAS read of the file will be a lot quicker than the external fetch of the file and SAS will read Down and conclude that it has reached the end of the file, and tell you the statistics and make you think everything is OK. However, if you run exactly the same code again and again you will get fifferent result every time, AND NO WARNINGS! Your only Choice is to adjust WAIT_MILLISECONDS, but as you never know the size of the file..... you are stuck,, Setting WAIT_MILLISECONDS to a big enough value will make evey sigle file fetch take at leat 2 times WAIT_MILLISECONDS (or maybe it was 3 times) as WAIT_MILLISECONDS is Applied to every single operation in the process (like also logging in). So... Be careful.. Check if this really is reliable in Your situation!!! I have only tested this under Unix/Linux. I do not know how this woulld behave under Windows.. It's possible that you get an error Message under Windows since I assume Windows is not (always) happy about Reading from a file that is currently opened for Write, Unix/Linux does not care and that's why there is absolutely no indications of any problems... As I said, I had to go for other solutions to fetch files With SFPT. The SAS Interface is (or at least was) a really bad joke. TEST IT before using it !!!!!
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