You might see this note when you invoke an interactive SAS^® session:

NOTE: Unable to open SASUSER.PROFILE. WORK.PROFILE will be opened instead.
NOTE: All profile changes will be lost at the end of the session.

The note indicates that SAS could not gain a write lock on your profile catalog.
By default, the location of this catalog is ~sasuser.v94/profile.sas7bcat.

The note does not cause any problems with your session, but it does prevent you from making permanent changes to your profile catalog (for example, the colors in your SAS Display Manager windows, or function key settings).

There are several reasons that you might receive this note. The most common reason is that there is an additional SAS process running under your userid, and that process has the catalog locked for write access. To see whether this is the case, first close any interactive SAS processes that you are running and then issue this command from the UNIX command line:

  ps -u userid

where userid is your real userid. The output from this command shows a list of active processes that are owned by this userid. In the last column, look to see whether any are identified as sas processes. You should not see any of those. If you do, you can kill them using the UNIX kill -9 command. Then, when you invoke a new SAS session, you will not receive the notes about the profile catalog.

Another possible reason for this note is that the catalog has become corrupted. You can test this by invoking a SAS session with the SASUSER system option set to /tmp:

  sas -sasuser /tmp

If this solves the problem of the notes, then use the UNIX mv command to rename your current profile catalog:

  cd $HOME/sasuser.v94
  mv profile.sas7bcat profile.old

The next time you invoke SAS, a new profile catalog will be created.

If you are intentionally running multiple SAS sessions using the same userid and you want to suppress the note, specify the RSASUSER system option at invocation:

   sas -rsasuser

The RSASUSER system option causes the SASUSER library to be opened for read-only access.

For information about a similar message, see Usage Note 8538: "NOTE: Unable to open SASUSER.REGSTRY. WORK.REGSTRY will be opened instead" in UNIX environments

Operating System and Release Information

Product Family	Product	System	SAS Release
			Reported	Fixed*
SAS System	Base SAS	64-bit Enabled Solaris	9.1 TS1M3 SP4
		HP-UX IPF	9.1 TS1M3 SP4
		Linux	9.1 TS1M3 SP4
		Linux on Itanium	9.1 TS1M3 SP4
		Solaris for x64	9.1 TS1M3 SP4
		Tru64 UNIX	9.1 TS1M3 SP4
		64-bit Enabled AIX	9.1 TS1M3 SP4
		64-bit Enabled HP-UX	9.1 TS1M3 SP4

* For software releases that are not yet generally available, the Fixed Release is the software release in which the problem is planned to be fixed.

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An explanation of why this note is written to the SAS log file, and how you can prevent it.

Type:	Usage Note
Priority:

Date Modified:	2012-01-09 18:32:42
Date Created:	2004-11-12 16:53:31