(PR#6830) Re: [Rd] 'R CMD build' fails when there are spaces in the path (PR#6830)

Prof Brian Ripley writes:

Note that it *does* work under Windows (via mapping names to short
names without spaces), so we should take care not to break that (and I
think adding quotes will as the shell quoting rules appear to be are
different).

I thought that R_system() would portably invoke a Bourne shell?

-k

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Kurt Hornik wrote:

ellis  writes:

Full_Name: Byron Ellis
Version: R 1.9.0 (and 2.0.0)
OS: Linux (Redhat Fedora Core)
Submission from: (NULL) (140.247.241.197)

It appears that `R CMD build` cannot handle spaces in the path when
building packages for distribution. For instance:

[ellis@net-78815 ~/Bayesian Networks]$ R CMD build bnsl
* checking for file 'bnsl/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
* preparing 'bnsl':
* cleaning src
* removing junk files
* building 'bnsl_0.0.1.tar.gz'
tar: Networks/bnsl_0.0.1.tar: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
tar: Networks/bnsl_0.0.1.tar: Not found in archive
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Error: cannot open file 'bnsl/DESCRIPTION' for reading
[ellis@net-78815 ~/Bayesian Networks]$ 

Results in a file named "Bayesian" (that appears to be the
uncompressed tar file) in ~/. I suspect some missing quotes somewhere.

The problem definitely occurs when calling R CMD build from a dir whose
file path contains white space.  Now in R CMD build we have

$ grep filepath build.in 
my $filepath = &file_path($startdir, $filename);
R_system("zip -r9X $filepath.zip $pkgs $topLevelFiles");
R_system("$tar chf $filepath $pkgs $topLevelFiles");
R_system("gzip -9f $filepath");
my $filepath = &file_path($startdir, $filename);
my $origfilepath = $filepath;
$filepath =~ s+^([A-Za-x]):+/cygdrive/\1+;
R_system("$tar chf $filepath $pkgname");
R_system("$tar xhf $filepath");
R_system("$tar chf $filepath $pkgname");
R_system("gzip -9f $origfilepath");

so in fact in none of the calls to R_system() with $filepath do we
currently perform any kind of quoting or shell escaping.

A simple improvement would be quoting all filepaths in R_system() calls
via \"...\" or '...'.  Unless someone has a better idea or wants to put
in more effort ...

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595