SAS: "ERROR: Rename of temporary member for WORK.XXXX.DATA failed"

Question

I'm having a problem in SAS and I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this problem or found a solution.

The problem occurs when I am sorting a dataset that I have created in a previous DATA step. I am using the temporary WORK directory but the problem also occurs with a permanent directory. The sort will sometimes succeed but will sometimes fail with a message like:

ERROR: Rename of temporary member for WORK.xxxx.DATA failed. File may be found in C:\Users\BLAHBLAHBLAH.

The SAS technicians have been of no help, and Google searches have been fruitless - lots of confused questioners and no clear solutions. The problem is not related to UAC or permissions or memory or disk space.

The problem occurs on multiple PCs with different specs, including some with ample computing resources to spare; we haven't tried it outside of a Win7 environment but the issue seems to be with SAS itself or an interaction between SAS and either Win7 or McAfee. It's not the size of the dataset; the problematic dataset has roughly a million cells and we can't replicate the problem with larger datasets. And the script we're using worked perfectly fine last year.

Has anyone out there encountered this problem? If so, have you found a solution? If not, what have you tried? Thank you!

James

Answer 1

Joe is probably right. Most likely a sharing violation caused by AV software. Because this is happening in your work folder it's unlikely that it's being caused by anything other than AV.

You can prove that it's the AV causing the sharing violation by using process monitor. There's a pretty good guide on how to do it here:

How to debug "Sharing Violation" when trying to delete a file

Good luck.