John Whittington <medisci@POWERNET.COM> wrote:

>At 10:24 27/01/99 -0500, Ward, David wrote: > >>Does anyone know of a quick and easy way to obtain the number of lines (i.e. >>terminated by a carriage return or line feed) in an external file without >>having the read in the whole file? > >David, as Michael has said, unless there is a known fixed number of bytes >per line/record, then I don't think there is any way that 'anyone' - whether >the OS, SAS or 'anyone' else - can possibly ascertain the number of lines >without examinining the contents of the entire file, effectively >character-by-character.

I think that's OS-dependent. The OS *could* keep track of the number of records. The Palm III OS seems to, for some types of objects that it stores. But I don't expect to see SAS running on a palmtop anytime soon.

-- JackHamilton@FirstHealth.com West Sacramento, California