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

Hi Peter,

I share your experience with trying to help IT departments setting things
up. The network directory of the students is mapped to a drive, but R still
uses the unc path instead of the drive when attempting to create that user
library. Unless I do it manually of course. The only solution I see right
now is to set the HOME or R_LIBS_USER environment variable in Renviron, but
that should be done each time a new student logs into the computer. Or is
there a way to ensure R uses the mapped drive instead of the network unc
path, either using an R setting or by messing with Windows itself?

Cheers
Joris



On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 1:21 PM, Peter Dalgaard <pd.mes at cbs.dk> wrote:

I can easily believe that. It was maily for Joris, that it might not be
necessary to reinstall.

-pd

On 17 Jan 2018, at 11:55 , Thompson, Pete <Pete.Thompson at iqvia.com>

wrote:

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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