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Help, R crashes on startup

3 messages · Julie Falcon, David Winsemius, Day, Roger S

Original
Julie Falcon
# 
Dear "R team",

I am a regular user of R as a social scientist, and since last friday 
for the first time I've been facing serious problems using R on a Mac 
computer.

I couldn't launch anymore R, it was cashing before it could open. I've 
searched on the internet to find solutions to my problem. In the first 
instance, it was useful, I realised that the file "history.txt" was the 
cause of the crash 
(http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html#R_002eapp-GUI-crashes-on-startup_0021). 

So, I removed it and R worked again until... this morning.

I am facing the same problem again, although I can't identify anymore 
the reason of the crash. This is not caused by "history.txt" file, nor 
by "workspace.rdata". I've reinstalled several times the R application 
(the lastest one, ie. 2.11.1 as well as an older version 2.8.1) but this 
doesn't change anything.

I don't know what to do, therefore I email you to ask you if you could 
help me.

I've attached a "R crash report" that may help you, but it was generated 
by my computer, not by R (I couldn't find a R crash.log).

I hope this can help you.

Many thanks in advance,

Best wishes,

Julie Falcon
Universit? de Lausanne

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David Winsemius
#
On Jun 21, 2010, at 10:34 AM, Julie Falcon wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Neither "history.txt" nor "workspace.rdata" are typical sites of  
corrupted workspaces. The default workspace is a "dot file", i.e. one  
whose name begins with a <dot> (= "."), named ".Rdata". These files  
are not visible in the Finder unless you change the behavior to show  
them. There are many sets of instructions for doing this that will  
come up on a Google search. The other method would be to open a  
Terminal window and:

rm ~/.Rdata

I do not think that corrupted history files are quite so common a  
cause, but getting rid of the default history file could be done in a  
Terminal session with:

rm ~/.Rhistory

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Day, Roger S
    

    

      
      #
    

  


  

      
Another possible culprit is ~/.Rprofile.
Once this was the source of my problem.
A tactic to help isolate the problem is to run

R --vanilla

from the terminal.  Then you can paste in lines from .Rprofile
one at a time, until you encounter the trouble.

Good luck.

Roger Day
University of Pittsburgh Departments of Biomedical Informatics and  
Biostatistics
University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute
University of Pittsburgh Molecular Medicine Institute
-----------------------------------------------------
Room 310, Suite 301
Cancer Pavilion (CNPAV)
5150 Centre Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15232
e-mail:  day01 at pitt.edu
cell phone 412-609-3918
assistant:
    Lucy Cafeo:       (412) 623-2952
-----------------------------------------------------

        
On Jun 22, 2010, at 9:14 AM, David Winsemius wrote: