Technology Tales

Cross-platform file and directory renaming in SAS with added return code handling

30^th March 2026

Here is another post on operating system-level actions performed from within SAS for the sake of being both robust and cross-platform. File deletion has been one example, so here is file and directory renaming. That got used while doing some debugging as well as a piece of validation testing.

The rename function applies to more than files, though, which means that the "FILE" parameter (in quotes below) is as essential as those for source and target file paths. That tripped me up when I went about doing it for the first time. All the action happens within a data step:

data _null_;
	rc = rename("&file_name..xlsx", "&file_name..bak", "FILE");
	if rc = 0 then
		putlog "File renamed successfully";
	else;
		putlog "Rename failed";
		msg = sysmsg();
		putlog "SYSMSG: " msg;
run;

Here, we have a null data step, which means that no output is written to disk. We also capture the return code for the operation in a variable called rc. If that has a value of 0, the operation has completed successfully, while the alternative can have extra information that can be captured by the sysmsg function, as is seen above. Putting this all together, not only can you issue the result of the operation in the log using putlog statements, but also extra information useful for debugging what happened and fixing it.

As has been alluded earlier, the rename function can be used with other objects too. Instead of "file", you can have these for those: "ACCESS" for an access descriptor that was created using SAS/ACCESS software, "CATALOG" for a SAS catalog or catalog entry, 'DATA' for a SAS table or dataset (which is the default and explains how I got caught out as mentioned earlier), "VIEW" for a SAS table view. That makes it more useful, even if the DATASETS procedure is worth checking out for some of these.