SAS Companion for the CMS Environment

Introduction

An external file is any file that is not maintained or structured by SAS and that you use during your SAS session. In a DATA step, you use INFILE and INPUT statements to read data from external files, and you use FILE and PUT statements to write to external files. Some SAS procedures, such as the CPORT and FSLIST procedures, operate directly on individual external files. You can also include external files of SAS program statements in your SAS session by using the INCLUDE command or the %INCLUDE statement.

As with SAS files in CMS, external files are stored within a Shared File System (SFS) file space or on minidisks. See VM/ESA CMS User's Guide for information about SFS.

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