Using SAS to copy a text file

Question

Is there a SAS procedure / function which can be used to copy a text file from one location to another?

Of course this can be achieve using OS commands (%sysexec copy) but surely there must be an OS-agnostic way to do this?

From what I can tell by looking at the documentation, proc copy (or proc cport) only relate to SAS files..

Answer 1

The simplest method is something like:

 data _null_;
    infile 'c:\input.txt';
    file 'c:\output.txt';
    input;
    put _infile_;
 run;

The method presented by RawFocus will copy any file, in binary, one byte at a time from input to output. For a text file this isn't necessary and doing the above will copy the file one line at a time. You may have to be slightly careful with record lengths, I believe that the default record length is 256, so you may need to put an explicit

 lrecl=32767

option or similar on the infile statement, as in

infile 'c:\input.txt' lrecl=32767;