Reassign location on SAS “WORK” folder March 6, 2007
Posted by riskopedia in SAS.trackback
Have you ever ran into problems that your harddrive is not big enough to run your temporary dataset? Or you are running a big job and wanted to use your external harddrive instead?
Normally when you start a new session in SAS, a “work” folder is automatically linked to the location of SAS temporary folder. If you want to change it, here are two ways of doing it (the following only applies to PC SAS version, not E-Guide or any other Server type SAS. Will explain later)
- Go to your config.sas, usually is in your SAS programs folder. Search for “-work”, then you should find a line of code with –> -work “C:/path….”, you just need to change this path, and then save the config.sas files. Hence, the work folder will point to the new location when start up next time
- Another way to do it, is alter the shortcut by adding –> -work “path name”. That should resolve your problem too.
Reason why it cannot apply to E-Guide server version because the config.sas file is on the SAS server, rather than User’s PC. Hence, all you need to do is asking your SAS Server admin to change that for you.
excellent thank you!
as a remark, when sas terminates unexpectedly, it does not empty its own “work” folder. consequence, i had gigs of files on my hard drive left on the sas “work”. and the windows search engine seemed to ignore these files, so i had to delete them manually.
also i find it useful to see the progress of these files when sas is doing heavy computations, hence i reassigned the “work” folder according to your instructions.
the sas config file is called sasv9.cfg (version 9.1.2) NOT config.sas as mentioned above.
default location is here: C:\Program Files\SAS\SAS 9.1\nls\en