Date:         Fri, 24 Jun 2005 14:55:57 -0400
Reply-To:     harry.droogendyk@RBC.COM
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Harry Droogendyk <harry.droogendyk@RBC.COM>
Subject:      Re: Conditional Import based on most recently created file
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

and if you add the /b switch to the /o-d, the header stuff will be omitted and you'll get just the filenames in reverse chronological order

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-sas-l@listserv.uga.edu
[mailto:owner-sas-l@listserv.uga.edu]On Behalf Of
cassell.david@epamail.epa.gov
Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 2:54 PM
To: owner-sas-l@listserv.uga.edu
Cc: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Conditional Import based on most recently created file


"Bonett, John" <jbonett@ETS.ORG> wrote:
>         I work in a Windows NT environment, SAS V9.1.3.  If I have a
folder
> containing versioned Excel 2000 conversion tables of slighlty
different
> naming conventions and only want to import the latest file (most
recently
> created).  Is there an easy way to do that?  Thank you in advance!

'easy' is relative here.

You're going to have to go outside SAS to get the date info on the
files.  One suggestion given recently in SAS-L is to use the DIR
function in a pipe so it can be read in a DATA step.  You then end
up parsing the DIR output to get the latest-touched Excel file.
Saving that name in a macro variable would let you run PROC IMPORT
with the information you want.  (I personally would do the directory
read in a Perl program, but that's just me.)  If you use a FILENAME
statement like this:

    filename dirlist pipe "dir /o-d *.xls";

then you can read DIRLIST into a DATA step.  And the desired filename
ought to be in line 5, right after the header junk.

HTH,
David
--
David Cassell, CSC
Cassell.David@epa.gov
Senior computing specialist
mathematical statistician
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