"Charles Patridge" <charles_s_patridge@PRODIGY.NET> wrote in message news:200309121228.h8CCSJq08545@listserv.cc.uga.edu... > Dear Steve, > > I know nothing about UNIX OS but it would seem Roland's suggestion is a > good one.

There is more you can do once you know awk/nawk/gawk as well. In the following case it will exclude those lines that start with a slash, since I don't want to know if the string "roland" is in the header of one of my sas programs.

$ grep 'roland' *.sas | awk -F: '{if (substr($2,1,1)!="/") {print}}'

I go wild with awk, sometimes. http://www.datasavantconsulting.com/roland/pagexofy.html

These utilities native to Unix and Linux are so much faster than SAS for doing this sort of thing. It is well worth learning them. awk is a programming language in its own right.

> In the meantime, I did a search on SASTIPS (using "search" and "replace" as > keywords) on SCONSIG.com and here is what I found - maybe these could help > you as well > > Charles Patridge > > http://support.sas.com/rnd/base/topics/datastep/dsv9-sugi-v2.pdf > > TIP00356 - How to Search for a specific record using SAS LIKE and CONTAIN > operators - by John J Genzano, III ; Sigurd Hermansen and Charles Patridge > > TIP00345 - A Simple Example to search a Char SAS Variable to see if it > contains several different strings/phrases by Charles Patridge > > TIP00202 - Dynamic Table LookUp, Nested Formats, Linking, Binary / > Indexed / Formatted Search by Paul Dorfman, Ian Whitlock, Karsten Self, and > Peter Crawford > Tip 00201 is similiar > > TIP00201 - Linking, Hashing, Parent/Child, Genealogy type processing by > Paul Dorfman and Charles Patridge > Tip 00202 is similiar > > > TIP00101 - Searching for any one of a series of words by Paul M. Dorfman, > S. David Riba, Faith Sloan, Charles Patridge and R. Krajcik > > TIP00077 - A MACRO TOOL TO SEARCH AND REPLACE PORTIONS OF TEXT by Jennifer > Lin > > > > > By typing in http://www.sconsig.com/sastips/tipxxxxx.htm you will be able > to pull up these tips individually.