problems using SAS mode

[Faheem Mitha]

On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Rich Heiberger wrote:

> The first question I have, is what computer and operating system
> are you running?

Debian Sarge, which I suppose is effectively Unix.

> As a corollary, where does SAS live?  And is sas
> in your path?

Well, /usr/local/bin/sas is a symbolic link to the actual executable
/usr/local/SAS_8.2/sas. This is recommended in the SAS documentation.

Chrestomanci:/home/faheem# ls -la /usr/local/bin/sas
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     staff          22 Aug 16 01:34 /usr/local/bin/sas
-> /usr/local/SAS_8.2/sas

My path looks as follows.

Chrestomanci:/home/faheem# echo $PATH
/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin

> I will answer the two halves of your query separately.
>
> 1.  M-x SAS works only on unix computers.  It doesn't work on
> Windows computers.  It assumes that sas is in the path.  If you are
> using M-x SAS and sas is not in your PATH then modify line 32 in
> etc/ess-sas-sh-command to reflect the pathname to sas on your computer.

This shouldn't be a problem. See above. Unless the symbolic link thing is
somehow an issue.

> M-x SAS is an interactive SAS session.  You type and then highlight
> lines in myfile.sas and send them to the running SAS with C-c C-r.
> SAS writes the log information in the *SAS.log* buffer and the listing
> information in the *SAS.lst* buffer.  Both look alike (except for the pts
> number) until SAS outputs something.

Yes, but is not M-x SAS supposed to start up SAS? Are the messages I got
normal behaviour?

> 2. F3 and the other keys that you set with
>   (setq ess-sas-local-unix-keys t)
> are not automatically set in the same instance of emacs in which the
> .emacs file is changed.  This command is explicitly an instruction to
> the startup of ESS that only takes effect on the next instance of emacs,
> that is, it looks like it wants you to shut down emacs and start over.

Yes, I did actually shut down and restart emacs. Standard procedure when
changing .emacs.

> You don't actually have to shut emacs on that first use, you can just
> execute the command directly with
>         M-x ess-sas-local-unix-keys

Hmm. This actually does seem to do something. Now hitting F3 gives

*************************************************************
cd /home/faheem/co/sas/
nohup sas ex1   -rsasuser &
faheem ~/co/sas>faheem ~/co/sas>[1] 7005
faheem ~/co/sas>nohup: appending output to `nohup.out'

[1]+  Done                    nohup sas ex1 -rsasuser
faheem ~/co/sas>cat nohup.out
faheem ~/co/sas>
**************************************************************

Is this how it is supposed to look? However, nohup.out is empty. Also, why
is it that restarting emacs does not have the same effect?

Also, C-h b still has no reference to the F# keys.

                     Faheem (now getting rather confused).