The default location for SAS to make and use its temporary working files is $HOME/saswork, that is, the saswork subdirectory of your home directory. It is possible to invoke SAS and redirect the workspace to a place with more space. If you need a larger workspace, see the section below entitled "Using Large Data Sets in the UNIX Environment.

The default amount of main memory that SAS can use for its work is set at 64 Megabytes. While almaak and aludra are powerful machines with more than 300 Megabytes of main memory available, it is also the case that at any given time these machines can have a number of users. If there were no limit on the amount of the machine's memory SAS could use, one large SAS job could grab the whole machine. Another related setting is sortsize, for which the default is 50 MB. Users may increase these defaults at the time SAS is invoked, but you are advised to be considerate of other users and ask only for the memory you will actually need. In no cases should any one user ask for more than 200 MB of main memory without checking first with the Statistics Consultant. To invoke SAS with more than the default values of memsize and/or sortsize, use the following syntax:

sas -memsize 100M -sortsize 80M

Of course, you don't need to increase both parameters except in cases where sortsize would exceed memsize. In all cases, memsize must be equal to, or greater than, sortsize. As you can see, if your job needs more memory, but does not perform any sorting, you don't need to specify sortsize at all.