Base option in libname statement

[dpa]

HI I came across this statement and want to know what BASE option doing.

libname HOME BASE "~";

[LinusH · Accepted solution]

According to the documentation this part of the libname statement declares the engine.

Base is the default standard SAS engine.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/syntaxidx/68719/HTML/default/index.htm#/documentation/cd...

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl//en/lrcon/68089/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n1nuvd4qvxu58on1m8p...

[Kurt_Bremser]

It means that SAS will use the basic SAS dataset format, which means .sas7bdat (or .ssd01 for version 6 and earlier) files. This is the default, but it might be handy if certain filetypes exist in the same directory that might mislead SAS.

[dpa]

Thank you for your help