Spool system option

[GN0001]

Hello team,

Spool system option specifies whether SAS statements are written to a utility data set in the work data library.

What is a utility data set? What is its function? What does it do?

Regards,

blue blue

[ballardw]

All those questions are the same one in effect.

Utility data sets are used to store data temporarily while SAS does something. Such as when sorting a temporary set is used to hold bits of data as the result is created. Different procedures may create different utility files to hold different data, depends on the Proc.

After what ever the specific temporary set is created for completes then the temporary set is deleted. That's why they are called "temporary".

If you crash SAS you may find some files in the folder with the corresponding Work library for that session with an extension of .sas7butl. Those are utility files.

[mkeintz]

@ballardw explained the concept of the spool option.

But you almost certainly don't need it.  AFAICT it is only useful for interactive line mode (for example, see SAS Help Center: Interactive Line Mode in Linux Environments),  That's an environment in which you do run SAS interactively, but in which you submit one line at a time - think of communicating by submitting one tweet at a time, in which each tweet is assigned a sequence number by SAS, and SAS returns a prompt for the next line/tweet.   With the SPOOL option enabled, if you wanted to resubmit some of those lines, you could type something like

%include 1 5 9-12 13:16

which re-submits lines 1, 5, 9 through 12, and 13 through 16 from the previously entered lines.

NOSPOOL is the default, so you couldn't use %INC in this particular way.  But NOSPOOL has no practical impact in the normal interactive mode, i.e. using a display management system.  You could just cut and paste from the program window, or select/highlight previous lines and submit them.

[GN0001]

What does this mean: That's an environment in which you do run SAS interactively?

What does interactively mean?

Respectfully,

blue blue

[SASKiwi · Accepted solution]

Interactive mode in SAS is where you interact with it like write code lines or view output. SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Studio, SAS Windowing Environment and SAS line mode are examples of SAS interactive interfaces. SAS batch processing is an example of a non-interactive mode - you just run your program, you don't interact with it.