how a user profile gets created

[emaguin]

I don't know that this is right location for my problem. Perhaps the list admins can move to a better list.

I'm a sas user and my computer was upgraded to win 10, software reinstalled, etc, etc. Now, however when i start sas i get this message

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.

I used to have a (very short) list of recently used files. Not now, they're gone when i  restart sas.

I pretty sure this is not something i can fix, even if i knew how. So who controls this user profile? Who do you think i should talk to in the heirarchy to get one back: Local IT, who did the sas install? University (central) IT?

Thanks, Gene Maguin

[JackHamilton]

Perhaps RSASUSER is set, or SASUSER is not writable.
What do you see with this?

proc options option=(sasuser rsasuser);
run;

[emaguin]

1 proc options option=(sasuser rsasuser);
2 run;

SAS (r) Proprietary Software Release 9.4 TS1M6

SASUSER=C:\Users\emaguin\Documents\My SAS Files\9.4
Specifies a libref or a path that identifies a library for the user's profile
catalog.
NORSASUSER Opens the Sasuser library in Write mode.

[SASKiwi]

The SAS notes you are seeing are the result of the default SAS installation setting of RSASUSER. This setting is recommended by SAS. This won't cause your recent file history to disappear. There must be another issue causing that.

[JackHamilton]

I was hoping there were non-default settings.

Another possibility is that your profile has simply gotten corrupted somehow, and you can fix that by just deleting it and letting SAS generate a new one. You'd lose your current settings.

Are you by any chance running two SAS sessions at once?

[emaguin]

Thanks. Two simultaneous sessions? Not knowingly. As for current settings, I don't have any that I set. I have no idea how to even do that. Let's say the problem is a corrupted profile file. Is this something that has to be done by somebody that has a win10 admin access? Where is the file located? What is its name?
More generally, where in the documentation is the user profile documented?
Thanks, Gene Maguin

[JackHamilton]

The profile (which is actually several different files) is located in the directory specified by the SASUSER system option; see the results from the PROC OPTIONS you ran earlier.  There are three .sas7bcat files whose names start with "prof".  Close SAS, rename those files so SAS won't find them, and start SAS back up.  You may have to open and close SAS and open and close some program files to build up a file history.  You might also need to rename the regstry.sas7bcat file.

This documentation is from 9.2 but I think it's all still valid:
https://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrcon/62955/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a001050172.htm

[emaguin]

Hi Jack,
I see three 'pro' files: profback.sas7bcat, profile.sas7bcat, profile2.sas7bcat. The first two have dates of Aug 14, and the third has a date of June 10, all 2020. August 14, a Friday, was the last time before the win10 upgrade that I used sas. The June 10 date was probably the first time I used sas on 'my' machine.
I see two 'reg' files: register.sas7bdat dated Jan 26, 2018, which must be a provided data file, and regstry.sas7bitm dated Aug 25, 2020.
I did what you recommended and now have a history. Thank you.
I'd like to ask a follow-up question. How do I go about editing or changing the defaults? I know there is Tools->Options but the range of options there seem to be miniscule but bear in mind that my reference is the edit->options tabs in spss, of which I am a very long time user, where many things are adjustable. Here are trivial things for sas: open program shows the last used directory, the output window is not opened at startup, the not-enhanced editor window is not opened at startup.
Thanks, Gene Maguin

[JackHamilton]

I don't recall seeing any documentation on what can be saved and how. That ought to be documented somewhere, perhaps in a user group paper or perhaps by Tech Support.

If you have a session open and RSASUSER isn't set, you can save some settings with the WSAVE ALL command. The documentation says only "saves all command settings that can be saved with the WSAVE command in all currently open windows." Not very helpful - I certainly wouldn't expect it to save settings that can't be saved. The settings it can save are generally (probably not always) settable by SAS commands (as opposed to statements) , and commands are documented under base SAS and also in the SAS Companion for your operating system.

If there's a Display Manager setting I always want, and WSAVE doesn't save it, I put it in my sasauto.sas program, e.g.

dm 'log; zoom on; autopop on;' log;