Casey,

At first I thought that you had discovered an error in the language definition for the ODS PATH statement. On closer inspection, it looks like you left out four small characters. The APPEND, PREPEND, and REMOVE keywords are not free-standing keywords. For reasons that must have something to do with compiler theory, these keywords are enclosed in parentheses. The access mode specifiers (READ, WRITE, and UPDATE) must also be enclosed in parentheses. Try the following statement and see if it solves your problem:

ods path (prepend) new(read);

HTH.

Bob Schwartz National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention And Health Promotion National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Atlanta, GA. US

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Casey Pierce Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 2:17 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: ODS Path

Hello SAS-Lers,

I have put off becoming comfortable with ODS just long enough to forget everything I might have learned in the classes two years ago. Now I am at a complete loss. Unfortunately, we are on a UNIX system, so most of what was in the classes was irrelevant anyway.

All I want to do is create a public catalog of styles for all users here to access, then access them. I believe I succeeded in the first part, as I have a catalog I simply called "rtf" for the time being. Within it, I created style "rtf1."

Now, the problem is trying to access it in a public macro. My path statement seems to be failing. I have:

libname _new '/home/prinf/programs/styles'; ods path prepend _new.rtf read;

Which I thought puts the store, _new.rtf, at the beginning of the list of stores to search with read permissions. But my next line is a "ods path show" and I get:

Current ODS PATH list is:

1. WORK.PREPEND(READ) 2. _NEW.RTF(READ) 3. WORK.READ(READ)

Which seems a little bit wrong. The next step is a proc report that attempts to call the style "rtf1" that should be in _new.rtf, but SAS can't create it because it can't find the parent template, styles.default, which is the parent for rtf1. Somehow, my ods path statement is removing sasuser and sashelp. Why is this? I didn't have this problem when I created the rtf1 style using:

libname new '/home/prinf/programs/styles';

ods path prepend new write;

proc template ; define style rtf1 / store=new.rtf; parent = styles.default; etc...

Any insight here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks. casey