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Mac OS X : The syndrome of the ghost file

Since SAS 7.1.2 some users are reporting a very weird behaviour that only occurs on Mac OS X Leopard, either on PowerPC or Intel CPUs, e.g. when running evselect the following error is produced:

% evselect table=...

** evselect: error (datasetCouldNotBeRead), The dataset with name
'/var/folders/tL/tLaDrvmwEzKdADGKYSBOfk' could not be read; either it
does not exist otr it is in an unrecognized format

The problem might occur with other SAS commands which call indirectly evselect.

Aparently, the run of evselect writes a temporary file under /var/folders which later on can not be read. The file in question under /var/folders/... has usually a longer name, so it looks like at read time the filename has been truncated by evselect or something in Mac OS X is wrong when handling temporary files in /var/folders.

Until now we have found only one solution for this problem: The problem does not occur when the SAS session is initiated via an ssh connection on the same machine.

Despite the fact we consider this solution a bit "esoteric", we continue investigating it and hope to find a better fix.