How about this:

data big; retain x1-x10 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10);

data small; retain x1-x5 (2 3 4 5 6);

*find the variable names from small *; proc sql noprint; select name into :namelist separated by ' ' from dictionary.columns where libname='WORK' and memname='SMALL' ;

data big; set big (keep=&namelist);

proc print; run; -------------

Obs x1 x2 x3 x4 x5

1 1 2 3 4 5

HTH

Ya Huang

-----Original Message----- From: Chelsea [mailto:admin.ra@IOIP.COM] Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2001 7:04 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: keeping variable

I have a smaller dataset with 600 variables, and a bigger dataset with 1200 varialbes. Now I need to create a subset from the bigger dataset, but the subset should only have 600 variables that are present in the smaller dataset. How should I do this?

Thanks!

- chelsea