Date:         Wed, 3 Nov 1999 09:24:25 +1300
Reply-To:     Mark Bodt <markbodt@STSS.CO.NZ>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Mark Bodt <markbodt@STSS.CO.NZ>
Subject:      SAS Tip: Version 8 Windows Dataset file extensions
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I was recently copying SAS datasets from a V8 SAS Session from one Windows
NT network to another using the SCL copy function. I found that where a
dataset already existed in the target library, it didn't seem to be
overwritten by the copied dataset.

On closer investigation, I found that there were two copies of the same
dataset in the folder to which the libref was allocated to, one with the
file extention .sd7 and one with the extention .sas7bdat.

e.g. for the 'mydata' dataset:

mydata.sd7
mydata.sas7bdat

Apparently both are valid extentions and provide for networks that cannot
handle long file names.

You can specifically specify whether to use the long or short file
extentions when you allocate the libname by using the LONGFILEEXT or
SHORTFILEEXT options

Syntax
LIBNAME libref <engine> '('SAS-data-library-1' <,...'SAS-data-library-n'> )
' <MEMLIB> <LONGFILEEXT | SHORTFILEEXT>;



+------------------------------------------+--------------------------+
| Mark Bodt                                |                          |
| Sunken Treasure Software Systems Ltd     | SAS Institute(NZ) Ltd.   |
| Specialising in SAS(R) Software          | Quality Partner.         |
| Consultancy in the Asia / Pacific Region |                          |
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