Getting Started with SAS in UNIX Environments

Determining the Completion Status of a SAS Job in UNIX Environments

The exit status for the completion of a SAS job is returned in $STATUS for the C shell, and in $? for the Bourne and Korn shells. A value of 0 indicates normal termination. You can affect the exit status code by using the ABORT statement. The ABORT statement takes an optional integer argument, n, which can range from 0 to 255.

Note: Return codes of 0-6 and return codes greater than 977 are reserved for use by SAS. [cautionend]

The following table summarizes the values of the exit status code.

Exit Status Code Values
Condition	Exit Status Code
All steps terminated normally	0
SAS System issued warnings	1
SAS System issued errors	2
User issued ABORT statement	3
User issued ABORT RETURN statement	4
User issued ABORT ABEND statement	5
SAS could not initialize because of a severe error	6
User issued ABORT RETURN n statement	n
User issued ABORT ABEND n statement	n

If you specify the ERRORABEND SAS system option on the command line, and the job has errors, the exit status code is set to 5.

UNIX exit status codes are in the range 0-255. Numbers greater than 255 might not print what you expect because the code is interpreted as a signed byte.

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