How to not to terminate read.table if the input file is empty?

Please give reproducible example, more information on your
troubleshooting and sessionInfo().  Cannot reproduce:

pathname <- "empty.txt"
cat(file=pathname)
print(file.info(pathname))

size isdir mode               mtime               ctime
empty.txt    0 FALSE  666 2010-01-01 12:50:55 2010-01-01 12:45:34
                        atime exe
empty.txt 2010-01-01 12:45:34  no

read.table(pathname)

Error in read.table(pathname) : no lines available in input

sessionInfo()

R version 2.10.1 Patched (2009-12-24 r50837)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

/Henrik

read.table terminates the program if the input file is empty. Is there
way to let the program continue and return me a NULL instead of
terminating the program?

$ Rscript read_empty.R

read.table("empty_data.txt")

Error in read.table("empty_data.txt") : no lines available in input
Execution halted
$ cat read_empty.R
read.table("empty_data.txt")
$ cat empty_data.txt; echo EOF
EOF

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