Executing a SAS program in R using system() Command

Question

My company recently converted to SAS and did not buy the SAS SHARE license so I cannot ODBC into the server. I am not a SAS user, but I am writing a program that needs to query data from the server and I want to have my R script call a .sas program to retrieve the data. I think this is possible using

df <- system("sas -SYSIN path/to/sas/script.sas")

but I can't seem to make it work. I have spent all a few hours on the Googles and decided to ask here.

error message:

running command 'sas -SYSIN  C:/Desktop/test.sas' had status 127

Thanks!

what does "can't seem to make it work" mean? what kinds of error messages/failure modes are you getting? — Ben Bolker
– Ben Bolker, Commented May 23, 2016 at 16:42
You are very unlikely to get an R dataframe using a command like that. — cory
– cory, Commented May 23, 2016 at 17:45
don't have time to tackle this right now, but I think the information you need is how to dig in and figure what "status 127" means -- i.e. general troubleshooting tips for system(). Can you run this command in a shell/command window and see if you get more information? There may be arguments to system() (maybe intern?) that will output more diagnostic/debugging info. (Maybe status 127 is actually OK, and you're just not getting the output you think ...) — Ben Bolker
– Ben Bolker, Commented May 23, 2016 at 17:45
Thanks again, Ben. I read the documentation for the system() and I didn't get much out of it. I will try running it in the shell window and see what results I get. — Ben
– Ben, Commented May 23, 2016 at 17:48

Dominic Comtois · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-24 01:43:32Z

8

Assuming your sas program generates a sas dataset, you'll need to do two things:

Through shellor system, make SAS run the program, but first cd in the directory containing the sas executable in case the directory isn't in your PATH environment variable.

setwd("c:\\Program Files\\SASHome 9.4\\SASFoundation\\9.4\\")
return.code <- shell("sas.exe -SYSIN c:\\temp\\myprogram.sas")

Note that what this returns is NOT the data itself, but the code issued by the OS telling you if the task succeeded or not. A code 0 means task has succeeded.

In the sas program, all I did was to create a copy of sashelp.baseball in the c:\temp directory.
Import the generated dataset into R using one of the packages written for that. Haven is the most recent and IMO most reliable one.

# Install Haven from CRAN:
install.packages("haven")
# Import the dataset:
myData <- read_sas("c:\\temps\\baseball.sas7bdat")

And there you should have it!

answered May 24, 2016 at 1:43

Dominic Comtois

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1 Comment

Ben Over a year ago

Thanks, Dominic! I appreciate the help.

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