SAS/CONNECT User's Guide

The BINARY Option

Usually, SAS/CONNECT assumes that external files that are being uploaded and downloaded 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 DOWNLOAD procedure.
CMS and OS/390 hosts use the EBCDIC character set; other operating environments use an ASCII character set. Consequently, if files are downloaded from CMS or OS/390 to an ASCII-based system without any character translation, the downloaded files cannot be interpreted by the target environment.
SAS/CONNECT solves the EBCDIC/ASCII problem by converting files automatically. The DOWNLOAD procedure converts text to the format of the local 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 DOWNLOAD statement, SAS/CONNECT transfers the file in binary image form (hence, the keyword BINARY).

Example of the BINARY Option

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

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

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

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