The reason I'm trying to get millisecond precision is in fact to be able to properly account for all elapsed time - when I added up all the "real time x.xx seconds" values in the log, I obtained ~1.5 hours, whereas the overall real time of the program run, as written by SAS to the log upon conclusion of my batch run, was ~2 hours. This is a significant divergence. However, just adding +0.005 seconds to the real time of each of the (as mentioned, ~300000) steps would bring the sum close to 2 hours. So, if the values are arrived at by rounding, it's fairly safe to attribute the time gap to periods not considered in the times measured by SAS. However, if they arrived at by truncating, it's quite plausible to assume there are no such unmeasured periods. I hope this clarifies the rationale of my questions. ... View more

I'm familiar with SAS formats and how/when to apply them. The issue is precisely that I did not find a way to set the format to display milliseconds for the "real/CPU time" messages automatically issued by SAS e.g. after a data step. It would be meaningful option in my opinion since it allows to use these out of the box log messages (with desired precision), rather than having to insert custom code to calculate and display the elapsed time. ... View more

Ok thanks. Do you by chance have any knowledge concerning the rounding vs. truncation issue I mentioned? ... View more