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SPSS on UNIX

Note: SPSS no longer updates SPSS for Unix. It therefore lacks some capabilities of the current version of SPSS for Windows.

SPSS, a major statistical package geared toward social science data analysis is available on the tombstone UNIX server. Follow these instructions to use SPSS under UNIX.

Most people run SPSS for Unix in a non-interactive (batch) mode. To run SPSS non-interactively type the following command at the UNIX command prompt:

     spss -m myfile.spss

where myfile.spss is the name of your file that contains SPSS commands.

To run SPSS on large data files, you will need to allocate additional space for its work files. To do this, invoke SPSS with the -s option. After the -s, specify the amount of space you are requesting in either kilobytes or megabytes. For example, you could request 4 MB of work space by typing either spss -s 4m or spss -s 4096k .

By default, SPSS run non-interactively sends its output to the screen. However, if you wish to capture the output in a file, you can use a UNIX command to redirect the output to a file. For example, a typical invocation of SPSS may be:

     spss -m -s 4096k myfile.spss > myfile.out &