Using SAS Files

Accessing Disk-Format Libraries in UNIX Environments

You will probably create and access libraries on disk more than any other type of library. The default engine and the compatibility engines allow Read, Write, and Update access to SAS files on disk. They also support indexing and compression of observations.

In the following example, the In libref is assigned to a directory that contains the Stats1 data set:

libname in '/users/myid/myappl'; 
proc print data=in.stats1; 
run;

Remember, a SAS-data-library must exist before SAS can read from or write to this directory. For example, if you want to create the SAS data set Orders in a directory, use the X statement to issue the mkdir UNIX command. Then, you can use the LIBNAME statement to associate the libref with the directory:

x mkdir /users/publish/books; 
libname books '/users/publish/books'; 
data books.orders; 
  ... more SAS statements ... 
run;

By default, the LIBNAME statement associates the V9 engine with the directory.

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