SAS provides
limited support for hard links and symbolic links in UNIX environments.
You can create links that point to a SAS data set or SAS catalog.
If you reference the link in a SAS program, SAS follows the link to
find the data set or catalog.
For example, you can
create a symbolic link in the
/tmp directory
to the
/home/user/mydata.sas7bdat data set by entering the following command
at the UNIX prompt:
ln -s /home/user/mydata.sas7bdat /tmp/mydata.sas7bdat
The following SAS code
uses the symbolic link in the
/tmp directory
to find the
mydata.sas7bdat data set. This code does not change the symbolic
link, but it does sort the data in the data set.
libname tmp '/tmp';
proc sort data=tmp.mydata;
by myvariable;
run;
If you are running in
the SAS windowing environment, you can use the
SAS Explorer window to view the symbolic links that are stored within a specific
directory. Any symbolic link that points to a nonexistent SAS file
will have a file size of
0.0KB and
a modified date of
31DEC59:19:00:00.
Note: SAS does not support links
for a version data set or for a data set that has an index.