What is the purpose of the PROC CONTENTS statement in SAS?

The PROC CONTENTS statement in SAS serves the specific function of providing a summary of the contents of a SAS data set. This includes displaying essential information such as variable names, types, lengths, and labels, as well as dataset properties like the number of observations and the creation date. This overview is invaluable for understanding the structure and attributes of the dataset before performing any analysis or data manipulation.

In contrast, the other choices represent different functionalities within SAS. Defining data for further processing typically involves a data step or various procedures designed for data manipulation. Running analyses on datasets is usually accomplished through statistical procedures such as PROC MEANS or PROC FREQ. Finally, printing the first set of observations would be the role of procedures like PROC PRINT, which specifically targets the display of dataset records rather than metadata or structural information. Therefore, the primary purpose of PROC CONTENTS is clearly aligned with summarizing dataset contents.