Re: [Rd] system()/system2() using short paths of commands on Windows?
On 10/30/23 19:07, Yihui Xie wrote:
> Sure. I'm not sure if it's possible to make it easier to reproduce,
> but for now the example would require installing TinyTeX (via
> tinytex::install_tinytex(), which can be later uninstalled cleanly via
> tinytex::uninstall_tinytex() after you finish the investigation). Then
> run:
>
> system2('fmtutil-sys', '--all')
> # or tinytex:::fmtutil() if fmtutil-sys.exe is not on PATH
>
> and TeX Live would throw an error like this:
>
> ...\username\AppData\Roaming\TinyTeX\bin\windows\runscript.tlu:864: no
> appropriate script or program found: fmtuti~1
>
> The command "fmtutil-sys" is longer than 8 characters and hence
> shortened to "fmtutil~1". Yes, in principle, TeX Live should work with
> short path names, but it doesn't at the moment. I haven't figured out
> if it was a recent breakage in TeX Live or not (I've tried to contact
> TeX Live developers).
>
> BTW, shell('fmtutil-sys --all') works fine.
I can reproduce the problem, also separately from R. It is not an R problem
./fmtutil-sys.exe --version
works
./fmtuti~1 --version
doesn't work
The problem is in runscript.tlu, when it looks at "progname", it parses
it assuming it is the full name, looking for "-sys" suffix, which won't
be in the short name:
progname, substcount = string.gsub(progname, '%-sys$', '')
local sysprog = (substcount > 0) -- true if there was a -sys suffix removed
and it does further processing using the program name.
This has to be fixed on the luatex end, it must be able to work with
short paths (e.g. expand it appropriately). You could probably work
around the installation before it gets fixed, e.g. by creating another
wrapper which would expand to long names, delete the short name, patch
the script, etc. After all, if it works via a shell, then probably the
shell is expanding to the long names and you have a work-around (I don't
know how reliable).
Adding an option to R's system*() functions to use only long names
doesn't make sense.
Best
Tomas
>
> Regards,
> Yihui
> --
> https://yihui.org
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 30, 2023 at 12:34 PM Tomas Kalibera
> wrote:
>
>
> On 10/30/23 17:18, Yihui Xie wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > It may have been so for 20+ years but I just discovered today
> that system()
> > would always try to use the short path of a command on Windows:
> >
> https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/635a67/src/gnuwin32/run.c#L141 If
> > that's true, I wonder if it could provide an option to disable this
> > behavior, because we recently ran into a case in which short
> paths wouldn't
> > work. I wonder what the original motivation of using short paths
> was. If it
> > was to avoid spaces in paths, wouldn't shQuote() work? Thanks!
>
> Could you please file a minimal reproducible example that exhibits
> the
> problem caused by an attempt to translate to short path names (note
> there is a fallback to long path names)? In principle, short path
> names
> should work when they are returned by Windows, this should not be
> causing any trouble.
>
> Thanks
> Tomas
>
> >
> > Regards,
> > Yihui
> >
> > [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
> > __
> > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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Re: [Rd] system()/system2() using short paths of commands on Windows?
On Mon, 30 Oct 2023 15:36:50 -0500 Yihui Xie wrote: > I have read about "system() not using a shell on Windows" on the help > page many times before but never understood what it means technically. This means resolving the path to the executable, then calling CreateProcess() to launch that executable with the given parameters and other settings: https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/635a672151a18a0e475986af592fab59e7479a9b/src/gnuwin32/run.c#L378-L386 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/processthreadsapi/nf-processthreadsapi-createprocessa As far as I know, CreateProcess() is the most direct officially supported way to launch a process on Windows. The alternative would be assembling the command line and giving it to cmd.exe to interpret and launch, as done by shell(). This can be more convenient in certain cases, as the shell can expand environment variables from %STRINGS% or launch multiple commands separated by &, but it also requires extreme care: quoting rules are subtle and have to be understood on both the cmd.exe level *and* the C runtime level (on Windows, the C runtime is responsible for parsing the string returned from GetCommandLine() and creating the `argv` command line argument array from it). Working with shell command lines is like using string operations on deparse() output instead of directly operating on language objects: less complicated than rocket surgery, but better avoided if alternatives exist. -- Best regards, Ivan __ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Re: [Rd] system()/system2() using short paths of commands on Windows?
On 31/10/2023 4:32 a.m., Tomas Kalibera wrote:
On 10/30/23 19:07, Yihui Xie wrote:
Sure. I'm not sure if it's possible to make it easier to reproduce,
but for now the example would require installing TinyTeX (via
tinytex::install_tinytex(), which can be later uninstalled cleanly via
tinytex::uninstall_tinytex() after you finish the investigation). Then
run:
system2('fmtutil-sys', '--all')
# or tinytex:::fmtutil() if fmtutil-sys.exe is not on PATH
and TeX Live would throw an error like this:
...\username\AppData\Roaming\TinyTeX\bin\windows\runscript.tlu:864: no
appropriate script or program found: fmtuti~1
The command "fmtutil-sys" is longer than 8 characters and hence
shortened to "fmtutil~1". Yes, in principle, TeX Live should work with
short path names, but it doesn't at the moment. I haven't figured out
if it was a recent breakage in TeX Live or not (I've tried to contact
TeX Live developers).
BTW, shell('fmtutil-sys --all') works fine.
I can reproduce the problem, also separately from R. It is not an R problem
./fmtutil-sys.exe --version
works
./fmtuti~1 --version
doesn't work
The problem is in runscript.tlu, when it looks at "progname", it parses
it assuming it is the full name, looking for "-sys" suffix, which won't
be in the short name:
progname, substcount = string.gsub(progname, '%-sys$', '')
local sysprog = (substcount > 0) -- true if there was a -sys suffix removed
and it does further processing using the program name.
This has to be fixed on the luatex end, it must be able to work with
short paths (e.g. expand it appropriately). You could probably work
around the installation before it gets fixed, e.g. by creating another
wrapper which would expand to long names, delete the short name, patch
the script, etc. After all, if it works via a shell, then probably the
shell is expanding to the long names and you have a work-around (I don't
know how reliable).
Adding an option to R's system*() functions to use only long names
doesn't make sense.
On the other hand, not modifying the executable name would make a lot of
sense, wouldn't it? I'm pretty sure all supported versions of Windows
can handle long filenames.
Duncan Murdoch
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[Rd] R 4.3.2 is released
The build system rolled up R-4.3.2.tar.gz (codename "Eye Holes") this morning.
This is a minor update, with a few bug fixes.
The list below details the changes in this release.
You can get the source code from
https://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-4/R-4.3.2.tar.gz
or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you.
Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course.
For the R Core Team,
Peter Dalgaard
These are the checksums (md5 and SHA-256) for the freshly created files, in
case you wish
to check that they are uncorrupted:
MD5 (AUTHORS) = 320967884b547734d6279dedbc739dd4
MD5 (COPYING) = eb723b61539feef013de476e68b5c50a
MD5 (COPYING.LIB) = a6f89e2100d9b6cdffcea4f398e37343
MD5 (FAQ) = 97a3ddc25aab502a70bfb1a79ab6f862
MD5 (INSTALL) = 7893f754308ca31f1ccf62055090ad7b
MD5 (NEWS) = b9ad3b7a9f54856444ec9849a69b18e3
MD5 (NEWS.0) = bfcd7c147251b5474d96848c6f57e5a8
MD5 (NEWS.1) = 4108ab429e768e29b1c3b418c224246e
MD5 (NEWS.2) = b38d94569700664205a76a7de836ba83
MD5 (NEWS.3) = e55ed2c8a547b827b46e08eb7137ba23
MD5 (R-latest.tar.gz) = 3217f2606bbde5a76fe4deaa4b4d3321
MD5 (README) = f468f281c919665e276a1b691decbbe6
MD5 (RESOURCES) = a79b9b338cab09bd665f6b62ac6f455b
MD5 (THANKS) = 45b6d2e88a6ecb5b24fa33a781351cd5
MD5 (VERSION-INFO.dcf) = 8d6576e0a33475e8b6dcb61f8e49a2b4
MD5 (R-4/R-4.3.2.tar.gz) = 3217f2606bbde5a76fe4deaa4b4d3321
60a0d150e6fc1f424be76ad7b645d236b56e747692a4679f81ce6536c550e949 AUTHORS
e6d6a009505e345fe949e1310334fcb0747f28dae2856759de102ab66b722cb4 COPYING
6095e9ffa777dd22839f7801aa845b31c9ed07f3d6bf8a26dc5d2dec8ccc0ef3 COPYING.LIB
3a47bca1e2a7db27c0ca12be388c238e2608ff2f768e627650a71a0ffc826038 FAQ
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5de7657c5e58e481403c0dd1a74a5c090b3ef481ce75a91dfe05d4b03f63163f NEWS.1
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1910a2405300b9bc7c76beeb0753a5249cf799afe175ce28f8d782fab723e012 NEWS.3
b3f5760ac2eee8026a3f0eefcb25b47723d978038eee8e844762094c860c452a
R-latest.tar.gz
2fdd3e90f23f32692d4b3a0c0452f2c219a10882033d1774f8cadf25886c3ddc README
8b7d3856100220f4555d4d57140829f2e81c27eccec5b441f5dce616e9ec9061 RESOURCES
8319c5415de58ee10d4bc058d79c370fd8e6b2ad09e25d7a1e04b74ca5f380a6 THANKS
f3acaa77b0034a44c9c9b02767a2d383a7c2c2e2a3e7fec929fa20c5102304c5
VERSION-INFO.dcf
b3f5760ac2eee8026a3f0eefcb25b47723d978038eee8e844762094c860c452a
R-4/R-4.3.2.tar.gz
This is the relevant part of the NEWS file
CHANGES IN R 4.3.2:
NEW FEATURES:
* The default initialization of the "repos" option from the
repositories file at startup can be skipped by setting
environment variable R_REPOSITORIES to NULL such that
getOption("repos") is empty if not set elsewhere.
* qr.X() is now an implicit S4 generic in methods.
* iconv(to = "ASCII//TRANSLIT") is emulated using substitution on
platforms which do not support it (notably Alpine Linux). This
should give a human-readable conversion in ASCII on all platforms
(rather than NA_character_).
* trans3d() gains options continuous and verbose addressing the
problem of possible "wrap around" when projecting too long
curves, as reported by Achim Zeileis in PR#18537.
* tools::showNonASCII() has been rewritten to work better on macOS
14 (which has a changed implementation of iconv()).
* tiff(type = "quartz") (the default on macOS) now warns if
compression is specified: it continues to be ignored.
INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:
* There is some support for building with Intel's LLVM-based
compilers on x86_64 Linux, such as (C) icx, (C++) ipcx and
(Fortran) ifx from oneAPI 2023.x.y.
* There is support for using LLVM's flang-new as the Fortran
compiler from LLVM 16.0.x (preferably 17.0.0 or later).
UTILITIES:
* R CMD check reports the use of the Fortran 90 random number
generator RANDOM_NUMBER() and the subroutines to initialize it.
'Writing R Extensions' has example code to use R's RNGs from
Fortran.
BUG FIXES:
* substr(x, n, L) <- cc now works (more) correctly for multibyte
UTF-8 strings x when L > nchar(x), thanks to a report and patch
by 'Architect 95'.
* contrib.url(character()) now returns 0-length character() as
documented, which also avoids spurious warnings from
available.packages() et al. in the edge case of an empty vector
of repository URLs.
* readChar(., 4e8) no longer fails, thanks to Kodi Arfer's report
(PR#18557).
* lapply(, as.data.frame) no longer warns falsely for some
base vector components.
* Communication between parent and child processes in the multicore
part of parallel could fail on platforms that do not support an
arbitrarily large payload in system functions read(
Re: [Rd] system()/system2() using short paths of commands on Windows?
On 10/30/23 21:36, Yihui Xie wrote: > I have read about "system() not using a shell on Windows" on the help > page many times before but never understood what it means technically. > Please forgive my ignorance. I still do not understand it, but thanks > a lot for the explanation anyway! As the documentation says, system() on Windows runs the command directly, without a shell (without cmd.exe). As it says, 'command must be an executable (extensions ‘.exe’, ‘.com’) or a batch file (extensions ‘.cmd’ and ‘.bat’): these extensions are tried in turn if none is supplied. This means that redirection, pipes, DOS internal commands, ... cannot be used: see shell if you want to pass a shell command-line. ' Things like redirection, pipes, etc are implemented by a shell, you can use shell() to run a command via "cmd.exe /c ...", so these would work. > I'm just curious if the full path > would work in system() today. If it still would not work because > today's Windows is still like Windows 95 in this aspect, please ignore > my question and I will ask Microsoft for a refund. I am not sure if you are asking a general question or specifically still for this use. In principle, short names are still useful to get rid of spaces (sometimes they are not quoted correctly, sometimes they cannot be quoted correctly such as in make). Also short names reduce the risk of running over the path-length limits. So R uses short names when they are available, but supports also long names and tries itself to quote properly. You have run into a case when an external wrapper has a bug and isn't able to deal with short names. There could easily be other wrappers around, which have a different bug and cannot deal with long names, e.g. because of spaces, when passing them to other programs. Very much like in luatex. And they may have been written in times when they actually were correct. Best Tomas > Regards, > Yihui > > > > On Mon, Oct 30, 2023 at 3:03 PM Prof Brian Ripley > wrote: >> On 30/10/2023 16:18, Yihui Xie wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> It may have been so for 20+ years but I just discovered today that system() >>> would always try to use the short path of a command on Windows: >>> https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/635a67/src/gnuwin32/run.c#L141 If >>> that's true, I wonder if it could provide an option to disable this >>> behavior, because we recently ran into a case in which short paths wouldn't >>> work. I wonder what the original motivation of using short paths was. If it >>> was to avoid spaces in paths, wouldn't shQuote() work? Thanks! >> No: system on Windows does not use a shell. >> >> The 'original motivation' was to work reliably! Back in the days of >> Windows 95 when many parts of Windows only supported 8+3 names. >> >>> Regards, >>> Yihui >>> >>>[[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> Please do re-read the posting guide. It has ' been so for 20+ years '. > My apologies! Sometimes I forget to switch to the plain-text mode when > writing to R mailing lists. > >> -- >> Brian D. Ripley,rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk >> Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford >> > __ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel [[alternative HTML version deleted]] __ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Re: [Rd] About FlexiBLAS in the R-admin docs
On Tue, 24 Oct 2023 at 12:53, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
>
> The output of session info is based on that flexiblas is used and on
> what flexiblas tells R is the backend it uses. R does not attempt to
> check that optimized LAPACK functions from the backend really end up
> called via flexiblas, and I don't think it could be realistically checked.
>
> But I've checked one case manually in Fedora 38 using Linux perf tool.
> The following code:
>
> S <- toeplitz((10:1)/10)
> repeat { R <- rWishart(10, 20, S) }
>
> uses dpotrf from LAPACK, which is optimized in OpenBLAS and ATLAS and
> the corresponding optimized implementations really appeared on the
> sampling profile for me from the backend libraries.
>
> The comment from R Admin has been removed now and if anyone runs into
> the problem (that an optimized LAPACK function is not called from a
> backend that provides it), it would be best to report it with sufficient
> detail to flexiblas.
Thanks, Tomas. Yes, if an expected redirection to an optimized
function does not happen, that would be a bug in FlexiBLAS and should
be reported upstream.
Related to this, a small detail... I noticed that the R configure
script reports "BLAS(FlexiBlas)" correctly as an external library, but
then "LAPACK(generic)". This should be FlexiBLAS too instead of
"generic". It doesn't make any difference, since the LAPACK symbols in
FlexiBLAS are called anyway, but it's misleading.
Best,
--
Iñaki Úcar
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Re: [Rd] dim<-() changed in R-devel; no longer removing "dimnames" when doing dim(x) <- dim(x)
> Hervé Pagès
> on Mon, 30 Oct 2023 17:17:47 -0700 writes:
> Hi Martin, Henrik, I actually like this change.
> Makes a lot of sense IMO that dim(x) <- dim(x) be a no-op,
> or, more generally, that foo(x) <- foo(x) be a no-op for
> any setter/getter combo.
yes.
For me, another "strong" reason for a change was that I could
add {or modify more generally} the *names* of dim(.) --- and
believe me, these can be somewhat "handy" when you a relatively
large simulation result array `ANS` say where
length(dim(ANS)) is 4 or 5.
Still, I've reverted the change for now, as it needed more
discussion etc and was unplanned for.
So, now, again,
A <- array(1:120, c(2,3,4,5),
dimnames = list(c("N1", "N2"), LETTERS[1:3], NULL, NULL))
str(A)
# int [1:2, 1:3, 1:4, 1:5] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
# - attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 4
# ..$ : chr [1:2] "N1" "N2"
# ..$ : chr [1:3] "A" "B" "C"
# ..$ : NULL
# ..$ : NULL
names(dim(A)) <- c("SSize", "Kind", "method", "rep")
dim(A) # is nice ..
# SSize Kind methodrep
# 2 3 4 5
dimnames(A) # *but* is lost (again, after my revert)
> FWIW S4Arrays::set_dim() does that too. It also preserves
> the dimnames if the right value is only adding or dropping
> outermost (ineffective) dimensions:
>> x <- array(1:6, dim=c(2,3,1), dimnames=list(c("A", "B"), c("x","y",
"z"), "T"))
>> S4Arrays:::set_dim(x, 2:3)
> x y z
> A 1 3 5
> B 2 4 6
> Note that this is consistent with drop().
Yes, that's nice ... and the drop() consistency is an extra.
Martin
> Best,
> H.
> On 10/30/23 03:53, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>> Henrik Bengtsson
>>> on Sun, 29 Oct 2023 10:42:19 -0700 writes:
>> > Hello,
>>
>> > the fix of PR18612
>> > (https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18612) in
>> > r85380
>> >
(https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/2653cc6203fce4c48874111c75bbccac3ac4e803)
>> > caused a change in `dim<-()`. Specifically, in the past,
>> > any `dim<-()` assignment would _always_ remove "dimnames"
>> > and "names" attributes per help("dim"):
>>
>>
>> > The replacement method changes the "dim" attribute
>> > (provided the new value is compatible) and removes any
>> > "dimnames" and "names" attributes.
>>
>> > In the new version, assigning the same "dim" as before
>> > will no longer remove "dimnames". I'm reporting here to
>> > check whether this change was intended, or if it was an
>> > unintended side effect of the bug fix.
>>
>> > For example, in R Under development (unstable) (2023-10-21
>> > r85379), we would get:
>>
>> >> x <- array(1:2, dim=c(1,2), dimnames=list("A",
>> >> c("a","b"))) str(dimnames(x))
>> > List of 2 $ : chr "A" $ : chr [1:2] "a" "b"
>>
>> >> dim(x) <- dim(x) ## Removes "dimnames" no matter what
>> >> str(dimnames(x))
>> > NULL
>>
>>
>> > whereas in R Under development (unstable) (2023-10-21
>> > r85380) and beyond, we now get:
>>
>> >> x <- array(1:2, dim=c(1,2), dimnames=list("A",
>> >> c("a","b"))) str(dimnames(x))
>> > List of 2 $ : chr "A" $ : chr [1:2] "a" "b"
>>
>> >> dim(x) <- dim(x) ## No longer removes "dimnames"
>> >> str(dimnames(x))
>> > List of 2 $ : chr "A" $ : chr [1:2] "a" "b"
>>
>> >> dim(x) <- rev(dim(x)) ## Still removes "dimnames"
>> >> str(dimnames(x))
>> > NULL
>>
>> > /Henrik
>>
>> Thank you, Henrik.
>>
>> This is "funny" (in an unusal sense):
>> indeed, the change was *in*advertent, by me (svn rev 85380).
>>
>> I had experimentally {i.e., only in my own private version of R-devel!}
>> modified the behavior of `dim<-` somewhat
>> such it does *not* unnecessarily drop dimnames,
>> e.g., in your `dim(x) <- dim(x)` case above,
>> one could really argue that it's a "true loss" if x loses
>> dimnames "unnecessarily" ...
>>
>> OTOH, I knew in the mean time that `dim<-` has always been
>> documented to drop dimnames in all cases, and even more
>> importantly, I got a strong recommendation to *not* go further
>> with this idea -- not only for back compatibility reasons, but
>> also for internal logical consistency.
>>
>> Most probably, we will just revert this inadvertent change,
>> but before that ... since it has been out in the wild anyway,
>> we could quickly consider if it *did* break code.
>>
>> I assume it did, or you would not have noticed ?
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> __
>> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> --
> Hervé Pagès
> Bioconductor Core Team
> hpages.on.git...@gmail.com
> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
_
[Rd] warnings() in R-devel: inherits from "warnings" - summary(warnings())
A few minutes ago, I have committed (svn rev 85445)
to R-devel {R's development source code, https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/}
a change with NEWS entry
* warnings() now always inherits from "warnings" as documented,
newly also in the case of no warnings, where it previously
returned NULL.
In addition to changing the R code to follow the help page,
another plus is that now
summary(warnings())
in the case of *no* warnings, correctly does
R> summary(warnings())
no warnings
instead of in current (released) R
R> summary(warnings())
Length Class Mode
0 NULL NULL
In a few CRAN / Bioc packages authors had used checks
if( is.null(warnings()) )
which will no longer do what was intended, as
the condition will always be FALSEm
so we strongly recommend you replace all
is.null(warnings())
by length(warnings()) == 0
(which works the same in current *and* future R versions).
One package maintainer has already been alerted, as he had
stopifnot(is.null(warnings()))
at the end of his test script and needs to replace it.
Something like
summary(warnings())
stopifnot(length(warnings()) == 0)
maybe a good way to end *such* test R scripts (where you treat
warnings as errors in the end):
Show (a summary of) the warnings if there are, and still stop.
Otherwise, we now *can* recommend using
summary(warnings())
more generally,
and particularly useful sometimes after
options(nwarnings = 1e5) # to get practically all warnings
Best regards,
Martin
--
Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich and R Core team
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Re: [Rd] system()/system2() using short paths of commands on Windows?
Okay, thanks everyone for the clear explanations! Now I understand it much better. Before I wrote to r-devel, I guessed it was probably a problem on TeX Live's side rather than R, therefore I also reported it to them and I'm still waiting for a response. If they cannot fix it, and R's system() has to use short paths, I will resort to workarounds. Many thanks again! Regards, Yihui On Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 4:22 AM Tomas Kalibera wrote: > > On 10/30/23 21:36, Yihui Xie wrote: > > I have read about "system() not using a shell on Windows" on the help > page many times before but never understood what it means technically. > Please forgive my ignorance. I still do not understand it, but thanks > a lot for the explanation anyway! > > As the documentation says, system() on Windows runs the command directly, > without a shell (without cmd.exe). As it says, > > 'command must be an executable (extensions ‘.exe’, ‘.com’) or a batch file > (extensions ‘.cmd’ and ‘.bat’): these extensions are tried in turn if none is > supplied. This means that redirection, pipes, DOS internal commands, ... > cannot be used: see shell if you want to pass a shell command-line. ' > > Things like redirection, pipes, etc are implemented by a shell, you can use > shell() to run a command via "cmd.exe /c ...", so these would work. > > I'm just curious if the full path > would work in system() today. If it still would not work because > today's Windows is still like Windows 95 in this aspect, please ignore > my question and I will ask Microsoft for a refund. > > I am not sure if you are asking a general question or specifically still for > this use. In principle, short names are still useful to get rid of spaces > (sometimes they are not quoted correctly, sometimes they cannot be quoted > correctly such as in make). Also short names reduce the risk of running over > the path-length limits. So R uses short names when they are available, but > supports also long names and tries itself to quote properly. > > You have run into a case when an external wrapper has a bug and isn't able to > deal with short names. There could easily be other wrappers around, which > have a different bug and cannot deal with long names, e.g. because of spaces, > when passing them to other programs. Very much like in luatex. And they may > have been written in times when they actually were correct. > > Best Tomas > > Regards, > Yihui > > > > On Mon, Oct 30, 2023 at 3:03 PM Prof Brian Ripley > wrote: > > On 30/10/2023 16:18, Yihui Xie wrote: > > Hi, > > It may have been so for 20+ years but I just discovered today that system() > would always try to use the short path of a command on Windows: > https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/635a67/src/gnuwin32/run.c#L141 If > that's true, I wonder if it could provide an option to disable this > behavior, because we recently ran into a case in which short paths wouldn't > work. I wonder what the original motivation of using short paths was. If it > was to avoid spaces in paths, wouldn't shQuote() work? Thanks! > > No: system on Windows does not use a shell. > > The 'original motivation' was to work reliably! Back in the days of > Windows 95 when many parts of Windows only supported 8+3 names. > > Regards, > Yihui > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > Please do re-read the posting guide. It has ' been so for 20+ years '. > > My apologies! Sometimes I forget to switch to the plain-text mode when > writing to R mailing lists. > > -- > Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk > Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford > > __ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel __ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
