Date:         Sat, 17 Mar 2001 11:12:18 -0600
Reply-To:     aldi@wubios.wustl.edu
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Aldi Kraja <aldi@WUBIOS.WUSTL.EDU>
Organization: Washington University
Subject:      Re: waiting for an external application to finish
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Hi,
There is a sas function that checks if a file exists or not: the function
FILEXIST(). I use it for checking if a
file is created or not and combined with the conditioning on the SLEEP function I
restart sas for its next work.
Here is a small version how I use this function:
        %if %sysfunc(fileexist(&dsn))  %then %do;
But this is for Unix. I hope similarities are for other platforms.

Aldi


N Yiannakoulias wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I want to call a console application from within SAS (I'm assuming there is
> some sort of system or shell command in sas to do this).  The trick is,
> I want SAS to sleep until the externl app is finished working.  The external
> app writes a text file that I want to open in SAS, but I don't want to
> attempt to open the file until the external app is completely finished.  I
> could cheat with the SLEEP command, but then I'd have to make a guess as to how
> long it will take to run the external application, and that's not very
> generalisable.
>
> Any insights into this problem (or anything related to tasks shared between
> SAS and another program) would be greatly appreciated, as usual.
>
> Thanks buckets,
>
> N
>
> --
> ----------------------

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