[…] Our IT department wants SAS employees to have seamless access to their files whether on Windows or on Unix-style file systems, and so they make it easy to access the same network path from Windows (using UNC notation, or "\serverpath" syntax) and Unix (using "/node/usr/path" syntax). As I develop my SAS programs, I want the programs to work the same whether run from Windows or Unix, and I don't want to have to change LIBNAME paths each time. Fortunately, SAS programs are usually portable across different operating systems, and while SAS data sets might have different encodings across systems, SAS can always read a data set that was created by a different version. …