Using %s in a filename when opening a device causes R to crash, e.g.,
pdf("foo%s.pdf")
win.metafile("foo%s.wmf")
postscript("foo%s.ps")
Do you have a workaround for this? Since that is done at C level, we can't easily trap this (especially on Windows), and the list of possible
errors that might cause a crash is rather long. It has been considered as a vulnerability, but there seems no simple solution.
The simplest workaround is probably to check that '%s' isn't included in
the character string for the file argument to each of the R wrapper
functions, something like
if(length(grep("%s", file))) stop("using '%s' in a filename is invalid")
This of course means that we couldn't use '%s' in a file string (is this a
great loss?), and that users could still cause a crash by calling the
.External code directly.
Regards,
Richie.
Mathematical Sciences Unit
HSL
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