[Rd] Bug with .First in R 2.10

[Mark.Bravington at csiro.au]

Under R2.10.0 beta (2009-10-14 r50082) my .First does not run reliably. I reported this last week, but not reproducibly, and it seemed to go away, so I thought it might be installation-related. But it has now recurred reproducibly, at least on my machine.

The website ftp://ftp.csiro.au/MarkBravington contains two .RData files each containing (only) a .First. One of them does what it should, and one of them doesn't. Confusingly, the OK one will actually trigger an error message for you, because it tries to do things that are specific to my machines. The not-OK one says "skipping .First", as below, and you'll see why it shouldn't be doing that. Obvioulsy, the files need renaming before you can test them.

I haven't been able to condense the .First to something more succinct that shows the same fault; saving a modified .First frequently makes the problem go away, seemingly regardless of what the change is.

The transcript from the not-OK version is given below

Mark

-- 
Mark Bravington
CSIRO Mathematical & Information Sciences
Marine Laboratory
Castray Esplanade
Hobart 7001
TAS

ph (+61) 3 6232 5118
fax (+61) 3 6232 5012
mob (+61) 438 315 623


R version 2.10.0 beta (2009-10-14 r50082)
Copyright (C) 2009 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
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[Previously saved workspace restored]

NOFIRST 
     "" 
Skipping .First
> head( .First) # what was it trying to do?
                                                      
1 function (skip.First = Sys.getenv("NOFIRST") != "") 
2 {                                                   
3     print(Sys.getenv("NOFIRST"))                    
4     if (skip.First) {                               
5         cat("Skipping .First\\n")                   
6         return(invisible(NULL))                     
>  


--please do not edit the information below--

Version:
 platform = i386-pc-mingw32
 arch = i386
 os = mingw32
 system = i386, mingw32
 status = beta
 major = 2
 minor = 10.0
 year = 2009
 month = 10
 day = 14
 svn rev = 50082
 language = R
 version.string = R version 2.10.0 beta (2009-10-14 r50082)

Windows XP Professional x64 (build 3790) Service Pack 2

Locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252

Search Path:
 .GlobalEnv, package:stats, package:graphics, package:grDevices, package:utils, package:datasets, package:methods, Autoloads, package:base