topic Re: Clutter in user folder in SAS Programming

Clutter in user folder

gabonzo — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 14:19:23 GMT

Hi,

my user folder is getting cluttered by hundreds of plots and histograms. When I close SAS, the folder is not emptied, and I have to do it manually.

Is there an option to force SAS to clean the user area from temporary plots?

I am using SAS 9.4

Thanks!

Re: Clutter in user folder

ballardw — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 14:36:04 GMT

If you can run X statements or %sysexec you might just write a small program line or two and put it in your autoexec.sas file

Something like

x 'del c:\pathtouserlibrary\*.png'

x 'del c:\pathtouserlibrary\*.html'

or have that as an autocall macro to call when needed

Re: Clutter in user folder

gabonzo — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 15:15:20 GMT

It's not a bad idea per se, I could do that in autoexec.sas

Still, I would prefer to have SAS do a proper cleaning on it own 😉

Re: Clutter in user folder

FreelanceReinh — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 15:37:09 GMT

@gabonzo wrote:

Still, I would prefer to have SAS do a proper cleaning on it own 😉

You could set the default path for those files to the WORK folder, which in general (as you know) is automatically deleted at the end of a SAS session. Again, the autoexec.sas would be a suitable place for a statement such as

ods listing gpath="%sysfunc(pathname(WORK))";

(For HTML files, if any, there is a checkbox "Use WORK folder" in Tools --> Options --> Preferences... --> Results.)

Re: Clutter in user folder

gabonzo — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 15:39:10 GMT

Yes, that would be the ideal solution. Thank you!

Re: Clutter in user folder

gabonzo — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 15:48:29 GMT

Ok, but please help me here:

I looked in the Tools --> Options --> Preferences... --> Results window, and the "Use WORK folder" checkbox was already set.
I still get the results html file in the user folder, what am I doing wrong?

Re: Clutter in user folder

gabonzo — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 16:12:00 GMT

Ok, I think I got it. If you use:

ods html gpath="%sysfunc(pathname(WORK))";

Then the image files are sent to the work directory, but the HTML file is sent to the user directory.

If you instead use:

ods html path="%sysfunc(pathname(WORK))";

Then both the HTML file and the images are sent to the work directory. You could specify different path and gpath if you wanted to, but it's not what I need here.

Re: Clutter in user folder

ballardw — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 16:16:43 GMT

@gabonzo wrote:

Ok, but please help me here:

I looked in the Tools --> Options --> Preferences... --> Results window, and the "Use WORK folder" checkbox was already set.
I still get the results html file in the user folder, what am I doing wrong?

The options list check box for results is basically setting the behavior for the one level data set name. If you have a USER library then one level names go there, not the actual WORK library. And USER libraries don't get cleaned. I did find that if you uncheck "Use Work folder" and change active directories frequently you can end up with HTML and PNG scattered all over your drive.

If you do not want HTML files in the USER library you would have to do something else. I haven't quite figured out a real good alternative. You could send ALL of your HTML to another specific folder but it would not get cleaned up either but they won't be in the USER library. Just set a specific path under the Create HTML and uncheck the "use work folder" I basically don't worry about it much and just clean up my USER library with a script periodically.