"NOTE: Unable to open SASUSER.PROFILE. WORK.PROFILE will be opened instead" in UNIX environments


You might see this note when you invoke an interactive SAS® session:

NOTE: Unable to open SASUSER.PROFILE. WORK.PROFILE will be opened instead.
NOTE: All profile changes will be lost at the end of the session.

The note indicates that SAS could not gain a write lock on your profile catalog.
By default, the location of this catalog is ~sasuser.v94/profile.sas7bcat.

The note does not cause any problems with your session, but it does prevent you from making permanent changes to your profile catalog (for example, the colors in your SAS Display Manager windows, or function key settings).

There are several reasons that you might receive this note. The most common reason is that there is an additional SAS process running under your userid, and that process has the catalog locked for write access. To see whether this is the case, first close any interactive SAS processes that you are running and then issue this command from the UNIX command line:

  ps -u userid 

where userid is your real userid. The output from this command shows a list of active processes that are owned by this userid. In the last column, look to see whether any are identified as sas processes. You should not see any of those. If you do, you can kill them using the UNIX kill -9 command. Then, when you invoke a new SAS session, you will not receive the notes about the profile catalog.

Another possible reason for this note is that the catalog has become corrupted. You can test this by invoking a SAS session with the SASUSER system option set to /tmp:

sas -sasuser /tmp 

If this solves the problem of the notes, then use the UNIX mv command to rename your current profile catalog:

  cd $HOME/sasuser.v94
  mv profile.sas7bcat profile.old 

The next time you invoke SAS, a new profile catalog will be created.

If you are intentionally running multiple SAS sessions using the same userid and you want to suppress the note, specify the RSASUSER system option at invocation:

   sas -rsasuser 

The RSASUSER system option causes the SASUSER library to be opened for read-only access.

For information about a similar message, see Usage Note 8538, ""NOTE: Unable to open SASUSER.REGSTRY. WORK.REGSTRY will be opened instead" in UNIX environments."