[Rd] [R-win] Bug 17159 - recursive dir.create() fails on windows shares due to permissions (MMaechler: Resending to R-windows at R-pr..)

Wed Jan 17 11:55:28 CET 2018

That solution works fine for the use case where each user has a network based home directory and needs to run R from there, but doesn’t help with my situation. I need to be able to support arbitrary network based paths in arbitrary numbers – so mapping drives isn’t an option. I have found a workaround using symbolic links to the network share created within the temporary folder, but would much prefer that R support UNC paths – it seems a reasonably simple fix.

Cheers
Pete

On 17/01/2018, 10:52, "Peter Dalgaard" <pd.mes at cbs.dk> wrote:

    I usually draw a complete blank if  I try to assist our IT department with such issues (we really need better documentation than the Admin manual for large-system installs by non-experts in R).

    However, it is my impression that there are also options involving environment variables and LFS naming. E.g., map the networked user directory to, say, a P: "drive" and make sure that the environment is set up to reflect this.

    -pd

    > On 16 Jan 2018, at 17:52 , Joris Meys <jorismeys at gmail.com> wrote:
    >
    > Hi all,
    >
    > I ran into this exact issue yesterday during the exam of statistical
    > computing. Users can install packages in a user library that R tries to
    > create automatically on the network drive of the student. But that doesn't
    > happen as the unc path is not read correctly, leading to R attempting to
    > create a local directory and being told it has no right to do so.
    >
    > That is an older version of R though (3.3), but I'm wondering whether I
    > would ask our IT department to just update R on all these computers to the
    > latest version, or if we have to look for another solution.
    >
    > Cheers
    > Joris
    >
    > On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 1:43 PM, Thompson, Pete <Pete.Thompson at iqvia.com>
    > wrote:
    >
    >> Hi, I’d like to ask about bug 17159:
    >>
    >> https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17159
    >>
    >> I can confirm that I see exactly this bug when using dir.create on paths
    >> of UNC form (\\server\share\xxx), with the recursive flag set. I’m seeing
    >> this when attempting to use install.packages with such a path (which I know
    >> isn’t supported, but would be great if it was!). I can see that a patch has
    >> been suggested for the problem and from looking at the source code I
    >> believe it’s a correct fix. Is there a possibility of getting this patch
    >> included?
    >>
    >> The existing logic for Windows recursive dir.create (platform.c lines
    >> 2209-22203) appears to be:
    >> - Skip over any \\share at the start of the directory name
    >> - Loop while there are pieces of directory name left (i.e. we haven’t hit
    >> the last \ character)
    >>  = Find the next portion of the directory name (up to the next \
    >> character)
    >>  = Attempt to create the directory (unless it is of the form x: - i.e. a
    >> drive name)
    >>  = Ignore any ‘already exists’ errors, otherwise throw an error
    >>
    >> This logic appears flawed in that it skips \\share which isn’t a valid
    >> path format (according to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
    >> us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx ). Dredging my memory,
    >> it’s possible that \\share was a supported format in very old versions of
    >> Windows, but it’s been a long time since the UNC format came in. It’s also
    >> possible that \\share is a valid format in some odd environments, but the
    >> UNC format is far more widely used.
    >>
    >> The patch suggested by Evan Cortens is simply to change the skip logic to
    >> skip over \\server\share instead of \\share. This will certainly fix the
    >> common use case of using UNC paths, but doesn’t attempt to deal with all
    >> the more complex options in Microsoft’s documentation. I doubt many users
    >> would ask for the complex cases, but the basic UNC format would be of wide
    >> applicability.
    >>
    >> Thanks
    >> Pete Thompson
    >> Director, Information Technology
    >> Head of Spotfire Centre of Excellence
    >> IQVIA
    >>
    >>
    >>
    >>
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    >
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    Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
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