Due largely to the work of Clint Cummins, the sas7bdat file format has become a bit less shrouded. In particular, we now know the following:

• how to detect files with compressed data (and fail graciously)
• more details about the platform that generated the file (e.g., endianess, OS details)
• how to read files that were generated on a 32-bit 'Linux' platform

These are significant improvements. The details are documented in the 'sas7bdat' vignette, and online at the sas7bdat Github repository. The revised R package will be available on CRAN shortly, but is still EXPERIMENTAL.