topic Re: Infinite Folders in SAS on Demand in SAS Software for Learning Community

Infinite Folders in SAS on Demand

Psyduck — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:58:32 GMT

Hello! I am a student using SAS on Demand for my epidemiology class. I am running into an issue where I have a folder name data inside another folder name data and they seem to replicate and duplicate infinitely. I want to delete these and its contents to conserve storage. I have tried opening the folders until it ends, but after several minutes of clicking I am not sure if it ends. When I try deleting the folder(s) name data, SAS says it can't be deleted because there are contents in it. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you all!

Re: Infinite Folders in SAS on Demand

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:31:41 GMT

Looks like you somehow managed to create a link to itself in the directory. You will need the assistance of SAS technical support for this.

Re: Infinite Folders in SAS on Demand

Tom — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:32:27 GMT

Are these folders on a disk? Or just in SAS Viya cloud storage?

If you can reference the folder directly in SAS code then it should be on an actual disk (or something that is behaving like an actual disk).

So you might try running code like this macro to get an idea of how many folders there are the directory tree.

https://github.com/sasutils/macros/blob/master/dirtree.sas

Note the macro will default to travelling down a maximum of 120 levels in the directory tree. It will also stop if the directory name would get longer then 256 bytes.

The usual cause of that type of infinite nesting is circular symbolic links. But I would be surprised if you could create symbolic links on SAS on Demand as it would normally require running an operating system command to make a symbolic link.