R has the function read.spss (package foreign), but it can't be used if the file is too big to your computer memory.

The script sav2dat.sh uses pspp to convert .sav files into data files with tab delimited fields.

To use the script, save it in your path and type:

   sav2dat.sh datafile.sav

Then, you will be able to read the file into R with the command:

   mydf <- read.delim("datafile-pspp.dat")

If the file is too big to be read by read.delim, you may want to use the function read.csv.sql from the package sqldf:

   mydf <- read.csv.sql("datafile-pspp.dat", header = TRUE, sep = "\t")