So you’ve got a Unix server that is terrific for running big jobs, either right when you
command or perhaps scheduled to run off-hours. What if those jobs could email you to
indicate their success or failure, with generated reports as attachments (when successful)?
And if they could automatically store all of their logs, date and time stamped?
This paper describes the use of a perl script that has been developed at the BC Ministry of
Health Services to schedule SAS® jobs on Unix. Here the term “job” refers to a set of
SAS program(s) and/or perl module(s) to be run in sequence. In practice, most of the
steps in our jobs are SAS programs, with perl used to do things like emailing reports, and
sending files via FTP.
The Unix server is up and running 24/7, which makes it ideal for scheduling those
massive jobs to run at night while everyone is sleeping. You may be aware that Unix
comes with a nifty scheduling facility called crontab, which lets you run programs at
specific times and dates, including the ability to run programs at regular intervals. Our
system extends the power of crontab so that we can easily run multi-step jobs. Log and
output files are automatically date-time stamped, so they won’t be overwritten. Reports
are typically emailed to recipients as a final step of each job.
conference:
Paper Type:
Paper
