Is there a way to make SAS stop upon the first warning or error?

Question

SAS likes to continue processing well after warnings and errors, so I often need to scroll back through pages in the log to find an issue. Is there a better way? I'd like it to stop as soon as the first error or warning appears so I can fix it and try again.

Answer 1

The ERRORS=1 option was previously suggested, but that only stops he ERROR messages from writing to the log. I would suggest another system option ERRORABEND which will stop the program from further processing for most errors. I don't know of an option to terminate processing due to warnings, but I think that you could add a macro like the following to stop processing.

%macro check_for_errors;    %if &syserr > 0 %then %do;       endsas;    %end; %mend check_for_errors;  data test1;     <data step code> run; %check_for_errors; 

You could repeat the macro call after each step of your program, and it should terminate at the point that the error code is anything but 0.

Answer 2

I've been using the %runquit macro recently. Works well for both batch jobs and interactive sessions (doesn't close your session, just stops running the code).

Source: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/research/tools/data_analysis/sas_to_stata/sas-macros/runquit.html

To use it you basically type %runquit; at the end of any data step or PROC instead of typing your regular run or quit statement.

Code:

%macro runquit;   ; run; quit;   %if &syserr. ne 0 %then %do;      %abort cancel;   %end; %mend runquit; 

Datastep usage:

data something;   * do some stuff; %runquit; 

PROC usage:

proc sql;    * do some stuff; %runquit; 

It's not quite as pretty when reading through code, but it does make debugging a lot easier.