Apologies ... I should have put a bit of detail about what I was actually doing when the lock occured.

The program is completely a batch program and is the only program runnign at the time (dependencies have been set to ensure this), and no interactive users are on the system that time of day - so no var/fsp/etc windows (and BTW no users access this file anyway). We use BJS as our batch controller.

The rough datastep is :

%do z=1 %to &_n; data mydata.u&&date&z; %if %sysfunc(exist(mydata.u&&date&z)) %then %do; merge mydata.u&&date&z work.transfile; %end; %else; set work.transfile; %end; by account; other data step statements ... ; run; %end;

note : Ive left off the code that sets up &&date&z ... they are of the value of putted sas dates in date7 format (27mar02).

It works for all the rest of the days (16mar02-17apr02). Most days this program runs with out problems, but *sometimes* it fails. this dataset existed before the program ran. Its nothing terribly complicated (there are no recursive call executes, which conceptually might be able to cause this sort of thing <shrug>)

thanks to the people who emailed me suggestions - just to let you know stuff I am following up : 1) backup software. It should have been running at 10am, so this is unlikely to be the cause, but I am checking.

again cheers for the help.

ghellrieg@T-ONLINE.DE (Gerhard Hellriegel) wrote in message news:<200204181024.g3IAO9818011@listserv.cc.uga.edu>... > On Thu, 18 Apr 2002 02:30:04 -0700, MarK Dodd <markdodd9999@HOTMAIL.COM> > wrote: > > >Im using sas 8.2 on NT4 (dont know what serv pack). I get the > >following error- > > > >"ERROR: A lock is not available for MYDATA.U27MAR02.DATA, lock held by > >another process" > > > >There are no other sas processes running at the time this process runs > >(2am), and there are no users on the system. the error seems to occur > >randomly through this job about once every few weeks. The process > >loops through a number of days in the month and at this point in the > >job, has finished about a dozen days in the loop. > > > >The sas tech site suggests virus software may be a problem, but it > >runs once/week and that wasnt last night. > > > >Any ideas ??? > > Hard to say anything, without knowing something about your program. > Something like that you get for example, if you have opened a var / fsp / > whatever-window and then submit a program what tries to access the related > dataset. That might be something, what your SAS program does. But to have a > concrete idea it is necessary to know that.