Which procedure would you use to sort a dataset in SAS?

The option that performs the function of sorting a dataset in SAS is the procedure known as PROC SORT. This procedure is specifically designed to rearrange the observations in a dataset according to specified variables. It allows users to sort data in either ascending or descending order, and you can also use it to remove duplicates if needed.

When using PROC SORT, you specify the dataset to be sorted and the variables by which the sorting should occur. For example, a simple syntax could look like this:

proc sort data=mydata;
   by variable1;
run;

In this example, the dataset mydata is sorted based on variable1. This makes it easy to organize and analyze data based on a particular variable of interest.

Other options provided do not perform sorting. The DATA step is primarily used for data manipulation and processing rather than sorting. PROC MEANS is intended for calculating descriptive statistics, while PROC FREQ is used for obtaining frequency counts. Thus, these procedures serve different analytical purposes and do not achieve the primary task of sorting datasets like PROC SORT does.