There are two independent ways of operating the SAS, either using the command line as discussed in section § 2.6, or using the SAS Graphical User Interface, hereafter called the GUI (discussed in detail in § 3).
The SAS GUI main interface is called by typing sas on the command line, but also almost every SAS task has its own GUI, which can be individually started by typing task -d.
There are advantages and disadvantages in using command line or GUI, depending on the type of work the user has to do and his/her level of proficiency in using SAS. Intensive interactive work on a single dataset is generally more efficiently done with the GUI. For beginners the GUI is generally better, because it eases the understanding of the parameters. For processing of large amounts of data the scripting capability of SAS, putting together a large number of line commands is of great advantage and extremely efficient. After some tests every user should be able to make use of the best of both SAS worlds.