Output window is full

[Marjolein]

Hi all,

I'm having very frustrating difficulties with SAS. I'm starting to analyze my data, but I won't get any analysis out of it because I continuously get 'Output window full'. Then I can select four options (file, print, save, or clear without saving), but I can't make any of the options work.

I tried to manually clear the window by using DM "output;clear", but this won't help either. I also don't really understand why the output window is full when I just start analyzing a new data-set.

Really hope someone can help me out!

[RW9]

Could be a few things, hard to debug without seeing.  Are you sure you can write files to the work library area?  Does it have enough space - you could get quite a lot of output very quickly depending on what you are doing.  Also, you may want to output to a file anyways, personally I turn off the output window not used it in quite some time, as you can get nice formatting and stuff in output files.  Another possibility is that its not removing the work on exit and a full work is remaining.  If you right click on work library in the SAS explorer, look at the path that is assigned, now goto Windows and navigate to that area, look at what is in there, check it is being removed on exit of SAS.

[Marjolein]

Thanks a lot for the quick reply!

Hmm. I do not write my files to the work library but to a library I assigned myself. Could that be a problem? And could it also be that from my assigned library the output is not cleared upon exit?

And how do you suppress the output then? Do you already do that by ODS to for example an external excel file? Because that was already in my script.

Sorry if this is very basic knowledge, I'm a beginning user of SAS 😉

[RW9]

Well, you could try creating a new file in that directory you save output to via other methods, e.g. assign a libname and then datastep something into it.  You (well SAS) might not have permission to that area in your setup, it may be limited etc.  If you don't write to work, then no nowhere else will be cleaned up automatically.

You can turn output window off by using:

ods listing off;

[PaigeMiller]

You can use PROC PRINTTO to send the output to a text file on your hard disk or server somewhere (wherever you want), and then the log window will not get full, all of your output will be in this text file (until you turn it off);

/* Tell PROC PRINTTO to send output to the desired location/file */
proc printto print="\\myserver\myfolder\output.lst" new; 
run;

/* Your analysis goes here */
proc whatever;
...
run;

/* Turn off PROC PRINTTO */
proc printto;
run;

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

Since an "output window full" message generally means that you have written literally 100,000+ lines of output you should very strongly consider what you are creating and why. (On my current set up the default was set to 2,147,483,647 lines and I know that I am not going to actually look at 2 Billion lines of output even if many of them are line characters or spaces between tables)

And what response are you giving to the choice about clear or save to file fo the results?

Can you provide code of what you are doing?

[Marjolein]

I took your advice and strongly considered what I was doing indeed. And it helped. There was an error in my code, which resulted SAS treating a continuous variable as a categorical one... So that took SAS a long time to process. Thanks for the help!