Stop SAS execution

This is something that comes up on SAS-L every so often. The answer is that it depends on what you're doing, largely.

The run cancel method is probably best if you are hoping to stop execution because of an error. At the top of your program you do:

%let cancel =; *or any macro variable name, but cancel is most logical;

Then in every run step you have:

data whatever;
... do stuff ...;
run &cancel;

And each time you have some potential error, you check the error condition and then if it hits,%let cancel=cancel; and you're good.

If you are using macros, you can exit a macro smoothly with %abort as long as you either use no options or only use cancel. Depending on what you're doing, you might set up your code to run in a macro (or macros) and use this option (although with the disadvantage of losing some log clarity).

Finally, if you're just interesting in being able to run a subset of your code, I recommend writing the code in multiple SAS programs for the bits you might want to run separately, then using %include from a master program to group them all together along with any macro variables you might want set that are shared. This is similar to how in EG you would construct many smaller programs and then group them using the process flow diagram.

I have used the following

%abort cancel;