bugs in system() handling long character strings??
There is an undocumented limit of 119 characters/line when using system(intern=TRUE) on Unix. You can easily raise it: it is in do_system in file src/unix/sys-unix.c. I think this limit should be raised considerably, but it may well not be worth eliminating it.
On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Naoki Takebayashi wrote:
Hi, system(cmd, intern=T) seems to have a problem when cmd returns a long character string. For example, if a file (/tmp/long.txt) contains a long string such as: 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 There are 120 characters in this one line.
junk <- system("cat /tmp/long", TRUE)
junk
[1] "1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678" [2] "0"
nchar(junk[1])
[1] 118 So one long line get separated into two parts, and additionally 119-th character is missing. Is this a bug in R or am I missing something? I tried this on R-1.6.1 on linux/alpha and linux/i386. Thanks, Naoki Naoki Takebayashi <ntakebay at bio.indiana.edu> --- Dept. of Biology, Box 90338, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0338
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