Access a permanent data set stored on a disk in SAS

Use the LIBNAME statement to access SAS permanent data sets. Depending on releases, the extension of a SAS data set can be .ssd (version 6.04 for DOS/Windows), .ssd01 (version 6 for Unix), .sd2 (version 6.08 to 6.12), .ssd04 (DEC machines), .sd7 (version 7 or 8), or .sas7bdat (version 8 and later).

Suppose you want to read a SAS data set named grade.sas7bdat in the ~/data directory. The following example shows how to retrieve a SAS data set:

  LIBNAME stat '~/data';

  DATA stat.new_grade;
     SET stat.grade;
     ...
  RUN;

LIBNAME associates a SAS library reference (libref) with a directory. In this example, stat is the libref that aliases ~/data. In Windows, an alias consists of drive and directory names (for example, c:\data\). The SET statement reads existing SAS data sets specified. This example tells SAS to read a SAS data set grade.sas7bdat from the library stat, perform some data manipulation, and then write the result into new_grade.sas7bdat in ~/data, which is associated with the library stat.