Also, if your SAS session terminates abnormally (i.e., it ends without you typing "endsas" or "bye" at a command line), or if a SAS "batch" job ends prematurely, you will probably have work files remaining in the SASWORK subdirectory. (The default subdirectory for SASWORK is /tmpsas0 -- a system subdirectory only for automatically-generated SAS work files, not for user storage or other use -- unless you invoke SAS with the "-work" parameter and direct the work files elsewhere.) It is expected that you will delete your work files if your job or session terminates prematurely. This is most easily done by starting up another SAS interactive session (or running a batch SAS job), since the shellscript that invokes SAS also cleans out any previous work files owned by you. Work files usually are not usable in future sessions, and they just take up public disk space (if they are in /tmpsas0 or other public temporary space) or your own disk space allocation (if you have redirected the -work files when invoking SAS). Please delete old work files when SAS terminates abnormally.

The default in SAS for allocating temporary working space is to create such space in the public /tmpsas0 directory; furthermore, the default is to make the files used for working space temporary, which means that SAS clears them away each time you end a SAS session normally. SAS provides a method by which you can ask these files to be saved permanently, instead of having them deleted automatically. Instead of letting SAS use the -work default (or instead of specifying your own -work location), use -user instead, as in the following example:

sas -user ~/sasworkfiles