I’ve recently needed to append several lines of data to a SAS data step that I collected and built via a shell script. For search-and-replace in bash I typically use sed, but this time I ran into a problem - sed does not like multiline shell variables. Thanks to Stack, I found a way to accomplish this task using awk instead. ...
I am currently working with a database provided by the North Carolina Department of Public Safety that consists of several fixed-width files. Each of these has an associated codebook that gives the internal variable name, a label of the variable, its data type, as well as the start column and the length of the fields for each column. To import the data sets into SAS, I could copy and paste part of that data into my INPUT and LABEL statements, but that gets tedious pretty fast when dealing with dozens of lines. And since I have multiple data sets like that, I didn’t really want to do it that way. In this post I show how a simple command-line script can be written to deal with this problem. ...