Importing a SAS file to R: Alas, STILL more problems--has anyone gotten this message before, and why

i am the author of read.ssd, and did not accommodate sas for
windows in the creation of that function.  i do not know how
sas is called under windows, but it is possible that if you
learn how to invoke sas through the R "system" command, you
can supply the invocation command as the "sascmd" parameter
to read.ssd

other ways of transferring the information from SAS to R
include 1) using a put statement to write the data out record
by record into a whitespace delimited file, and then using
read.table in R to collect the data for use in R, 2) using
read.ssd on a unix system, saving the resulting R object,
and then transferring the R object back to windows.

---
Vince Carey

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Shoultz, Gerald wrote:

Sorry to write twice in one day--I am a relative newbie to some of
these parts of R, and I am pulling my hair out!  B/c I am preparing a
file to use WINBUGS I am cross-posting to the BUGS group as well, in
case anyone there has some ideas on this.

I've got a large SAS dataset that I want to put in R form to more
easily use the file with the hierarchical modeling software WINBUGS.
It has numerous variables, so setting up "vertical text files" could
be awkward. I did get the library foreign installed OK.  I am now
trying to run read.ssd.  What I have below is similar to that found in
the documentation for the foreign package, p.9:

 list.files("C:/Project_data/WINBUGSfiles")

[1] "lastfile.sas7bdat"

dtabunch<-read.ssd("C:/Project_data/WINBUGSfiles","lastfile")

I unfortunately got this:

SAS failed.  SAS program at
C:\DOCUME~1\bjz9\LOCALS~1\Temp\Rtmp23335\file29621.sas
a log and other error products should be in the vicinity
Warning messages:
1: sas not found
2: ls not found
3: SAS return code was -1 in: read.ssd("C:/Project_data/WINBUGSfiles",
"lastfile")

I have tried to find the log file but have been unable to do so.Can
someone who has had this happen before kindly tell me what exactly (or
possibly) is going on?  I went to the SAS Technical Support Document
TS-140 to try to get help and really didn't get much out of that. 
Does anyone know a better (as in "foolproof/will avoid meaningless
error messages") way to get a SAS dataset into R-format?  Any help on
this would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

Gerald Shoultz