This page is a suggestion on how to run many SAS jobs under MS Windows.
The problem
Suppose you have more than 150 sas jobs to run and you want to make sure
they all run together with none missed out. Maybe you want to keep a log
of this run with brief completion diagnostics taken from the sas logs.
You maybe want to know when the run started and who started it and when
it ended and you want to keep this information somewhere. Suppose there
are about 250 outputs and you want to gather these together in the correct
order of table and listing number. If you are finding this sort of thing
very difficult or impossible to do under MS Windows then you are not alone.
There is a good reason why MS Windows has poor utilities for doing such
a thing. This is because MS Windows was designed for PCs or Personal Computers.
In other words it was designed for single users doing personal
computing. There is no reason to expect MS Windows to have utilities
to help you organise the running of hundreds of programs. It wasn't designed
to do this.
The solution
The solution to organising the running of hundreds of SAS programs is to
use Unix, or at least an emulation of it. You don't have to give up using
your MS Windows computer to do this or to give up using MS Windows. Unix
(or Linux, which works in the same way) can be emulated on your MS Windows
machine. MS Windows has the power to do all of these things built into
it, but lacks the utilities to achieve it. But you can download and install
a free Linux emulator that can do nearly everything Linux can do and this
emulator calls MS Windows services to do it. The solution, then, it to
download and install a good Linux emulator that works with MS Windows and
for that I recommend Cygwin. I have that working on my PC. You need
to know Unix commands, and you need to know how to write what are known
as "shell scripts" and then organising the bulk running as SAS jobs becomes
easy.
Cygwin
You can read about how to install Cygwin on your PC elsewhere on this web
site. There are also instructions on this in the Spectre (Clinical) documentation.
You can link to a Wikipedia article on Cygwin here
and the main Cygwin web site here.
There are articles on this web site and in the Spectre (Clinical) documentation
to teach you Unix commands and how to write shell scripts. Once you have
this software and the required knowledge then getting MS Windows to run
hundreds of sas programs will no longer be a problem.