title: SAS - Reading a File Backwards?
body: <p>I need SAS to read many large log files, which are set up to have the most recent activities at the bottom. All I need is the most recent time a particular activity occurred, and I was wondering if it's possible for SAS to skip parsing the (long) beginning parts of the file.</p>
  
  <p>I looked online and found how to read a dataset backwards, but that would require SAS to first parse everything in the .log file into the dataset first. Is it possible to directly read the file starting from the very end so that I can stop the data step as soon as I find the most recent activity of a particular type?</p>
  
  <p>I read up on infile as well, and the firstobs option, but I have no idea how long these log files are until they are parsed, right? Sounds like a catch-22 to me. So is what I'm describing doable?</p>