On your INFILE statement make certain you include the LRECL parameter. Michelle Burlew in her excellent book Reading External Data Files Using SAS notes that external files downloaded from EBCDIC system of fixed length do not contain End-of-Record (EOR) markers. As others have pointed out, you will need to determine the record length of the data set on the mainframe. Are you using $ebcdic informat for character variables and s370ff  informat for numeric variables? As others have noted, check with the person who created the file to see if it contains binary or packed decimal data. I hope this solves your problem.                                                                    Charles ... View more