dev.print + impossible filename -> break (PR#1959)

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002 ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk wrote:

> Here's the nub.
>
> > postscript(file="|llllll")
> > sh: llllll: command not found
>
> > dev.off()
> Broken pipe
>
> and it's related to how popen/pclose are implemented.  The help page
> does say errors are hard to detect, but we can do a bit better than this.

What I tested was checking errno, which the man page says gets set.
But on Linux I find:

popen succeeds, returns a valid file handle and does not set errno.
pclose on that file handle terminates the process.

The last can be avoided by setting a signal handler for SIGPIPE,
although that's not portable across OSes.


Anyone know a portable way to do this?

-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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