SAS/CONNECT User's Guide

The BINARY Option

Usually, SAS/CONNECT assumes that external files that are being uploaded are text files, and it alters them so that they can be used on the target machine. Two features are affected.

Each operating environment has its own type of record delimiters in external files. The record delimiters are incompatible between operating environments. Therefore, record delimiters appropriate to the target environment are added to the copied file by the UPLOAD procedure.
CMS and OS/390 hosts use the EBCDIC character set; other operating environments use an ASCII character set. Consequently, if files are uploaded from an ASCII-based environment to CMS or OS/390 without character translations, the uploaded files cannot be interpreted by the target environment.
SAS/CONNECT solves the EBCDIC/ASCII problem by converting files automatically. The UPLOAD procedure converts text to the format of the remote host.

There are times when these file conversions are not desirable. For example, you may need to upload executable files from the local host to the remote host and later download them to the same or a different local host. You may want to do this for backup purposes or to send files to other users.

When you do not want a file translated to another character set or record delimiters inserted, you can use the BINARY option to prevent automatic conversion. When you specify the BINARY option in a PROC UPLOAD statement, SAS/CONNECT transfers the file in binary image form (hence, the keyword BINARY).

Example of the BINARY Option

This example uses a PROC UPLOAD statement for uploading an external file to the remote host. Note that the BINARY option is included to suppress character-set translation and to prevent record-delimiter insertion:

proc upload infile='external-file-name'
   outfile=hostmod binary;
run;

This PROC UPLOAD step is excerpted from Example 10. DTS: Distributing an .EXE File from the Remote Host to Multiple Local Hosts.

The next example is a PROC UPLOAD statement for uploading a local SAS data set to the remote host:

proc upload data=pcnote.usage out=hostnote.usage;
run;

This PROC UPLOAD step is excerpted from Example 12. DTS: Downloading a Partitioned Data Set from an OS/390 Host.

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