re creating a batch file from windows nt in sasswb k sasswb unx sas com scott bass writes for windows nt is there an alternative to the archane fairly useless dos batch programming language for os ibm introduced the rexx language as an alternative to bat surely windows nt should do the same thing right in lieu of the above is there any way to escape the cr lf in a bat file and continue a single command across multiple lines i have an application which exits to the system and submits a batch file the batch file is created on the fly from site specific code stored within the application as currently designed the line length for the stored code and the output file bat file is characters which is not enough for all the options that must be specified on a particular command it would help tremendously if i didn t have to redesign my code to kludge around the lack of a true batch shell programming language rest deleted as a followup to my post let me add that i m not really a windows or windows nt user so please excuse my ignorance however i m a developer at sas institute and one component of the application that i support is the ability to submit a sas batch job from within an interactive sas session the user site can enter their site specific batch profile into a dataset within our product specifying the pathname to the sas executable specifying site specific sas options etc at run time certain variables are resolved and the resolved file is written to an external ascii file then i exit to the operating system and run the job asynchronously returning to the interactive session as soon as the job is submitted the batch job then runs concurrently with the interactive session as currently designed the internal dataset has a record length of characters but to run the batch job the command to reinvoke sas in batch mode requires more than characters up til nt this has not been a problem since every job control shell language up til nt eg mvs cms vms unix os had a way to escape the cr lf and enter a single command across multiple lines os via their rexx language which is standard with os the gist of all this is since this application is for end users not within my company i have to try to develop this process using native nt since my first posting i ve learned that there are several third party companies that provide alternative script languages for windows windows nt and i m sure a company that licenses our product would use that alternative script language if they had it but i can t develop under the assumption that they have anything other than what comes with nt i saw another post on this list the subject was something like is vi available for windows in which someone said that vi make awk and ksh was available with microsoft toolkit what is that product is it a separate product or part of windows ksh would do what i need if i could count on it at all nt sites one last question i ve heard that nt has remote processing capabilities i e i could shove this batch job off to a server machine and have it run there if these are native nt commands rather than network specific commands this would also help me improve this process if you can comment on these commands i would appreciate it thanks again for the help scott bass sas institute inc integrated systems a x sas campus drive cary nc sasswb k unx sas com x
