sas_util file

[woo]

does sas_util file under temp work dir has data? 

there is one big sas_util file under temp work dir and we want to delete it but we don't want to loose any data - can we delete it? we want to freeup some space...

thanks!

[SASKiwi · Accepted solution]

SAS_UTIL files are temporary utility files used by SAS for processing purposes. It is safe to delete them as long as the SAS process that created it is no longer running.

Most SAS sites regularly run the CLEANWORK utility to do automatic removal of old temporary SAS files and folders.

[woo]

Thank you SASKiwi - we had error in code and we closed session so may be SAS didn't have opportunity to clean up itself when we closed it...

[Reeza]

---

@woo wrote:
Thank you SASKiwi - we had error in code and we closed session so may be SAS didn't have opportunity to clean up itself when we closed it...

---

This is a common occurrence, from users not waiting for a process to finish or SAS terminating abruptly. As @SASKiwi mentions, running Clean Work utility on a regular basis to avoid files left lying around after a process abnormally terminates.

[woo]

Thank you Reeza for your comment, we have that in place but i think since sas eg looks for pid upon cleanup, that session might be left over (uncleaned).

[Kurt_Bremser]

---

@woo wrote:
Thank you SASKiwi - we had error in code and we closed session so may be SAS didn't have opportunity to clean up itself when we closed it...

---

I have a shell script that runs cleanwork on all our WORK/UTILLOC locations. Besides being run from cron, I also run that script everytime I have to kill a SAS process.

Some programming errors can leave SAS in a state where only kill -9 works, or even a successful kill without -9 does not perform the cleanup.