[Rd] R CMD build wiped my computer (from R-help)

Duncan Murdoch murdoch.duncan at gmail.com
Thu Jul 29 13:58:20 CEST 2010 

On 28/07/2010 8:10 PM, Ray Brownrigg wrote:
> NOTE: Now submitted to R-devel, as this seems more appropriate.
> 
> I may have spoken too soon about this having been fixed. (see below).
> 
> If I create another "unusual but not 'invalid'" filename in the R subdirectory, the 
> behaviour is different from that reported below, and is similar to the original poster's 
> output (the third "unlink" command, where "xyz" was "~"):
> 
> circa>  ls -al RColorBrewer/R
> total 140
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ray  ecs  43988 Apr 17  2005    ColorBrewer.R~*
> -rw-r--r--  1 ray  ecs      0 Jul 29 09:57    residuals.MCMCglmm.R?xyz

Ray clarified to me that this filename was "residuals.MCMCglmm.R" 
preceded by 3 spaces and followed by a carriage return and "xyz".

> drwxr-xr-x  2 ray  ecs   4096 Jul 29 12:02 ./
> drwxr-xr-x  5 ray  ecs   4096 Jul 29 11:49 ../
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ray  ecs  43988 Jul 29 09:57 ColorBrewer.R*
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 ray  ecs  43988 Apr 17  2005 ColorBrewer.R~*
> -rw-r--r--  1 ray  ecs      0 Jul 29 09:58 residuals.MCMCglmm.R
> circa>
> circa>
> circa>  R CMD build RColorBrewer
> * checking for file 'RColorBrewer/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
> * preparing 'RColorBrewer':
> * checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
> * checking whether 'INDEX' is up-to-date ... NO
> * use '--force' to overwrite the existing 'INDEX'
> * removing junk files
> unlink RColorBrewer/R/   ColorBrewer.R~
> unlink RColorBrewer/R/ColorBrewer.R
> unlink RColorBrewer/R/   residuals.MCMCglmm.R
> xyz

That certainly looks bad.  I can't reproduce it on Windows; it doesn't 
allow that filename.  So I'll have to leave this for a Unix-alike user.

Duncan Murdoch

> unlink RColorBrewer/R/residuals.MCMCglmm.R
> unlink RColorBrewer/R/ColorBrewer.R~
> rmdir RColorBrewer/R
> * checking for LF line-endings in source and make files
> * checking for empty or unneeded directories
> * building 'RColorBrewer_1.0-3.tar.gz'
> 
> circa>
> 
> Ray Brownrigg
> 
> On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, Ray Brownrigg wrote:
>> On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>> On 28/07/2010 10:01 AM, Jarrod Hadfield wrote:
>>>> Hi Marc,
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the info on recovery - most of it can pieced together from
>>>> backups but a quick, cheap and easy method of recovery would have been
>>>> nicer.
>>>>
>>>> My main concern is that this could happen again and that the "bug" is
>>>> not limited to R 2.9. I would think that an accidental carriage return
>>>> at the end of a file name (even a temporary one) would be a reasonably
>>>> common phenomenon (I'm surprised I hadn't done it before).
>>> If you can put together a recipe to reproduce the problem (or a less
>>> extreme version of R deleting files it shouldn't), we'll certainly fix
>>> it.  But so far all we've got are guesses about what might have gone
>>> wrong, and I don't think anyone has been able to reproduce the problem
>>> on current R.
>> Duncan:
>>
>> It looks to me like it has already been fixed, if indeed that was the
>> problem.  In R-2.10.1, I tried to reproduce the problem (using
>> RColorBrewer, since that was the smallest package I have a local copy of),
>> and the build produced this:
>>
>> * removing junk files
>> * excluding invalid files from 'RColorBrewer'
>> Subdirectory 'R' contains invalid file names:
>>   residuals.MCMCglmm.R xyz
>>
>> where the space shown between the "R" and the "xyz" was a newline
>> character. [I didn't dare try using a "~" :-)]
>>
>> Ray Brownrigg
>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>
>>>> Jarrod
>>>>
>>>> On 28 Jul 2010, at 14:04, Marc Schwartz wrote:
>>>>> Jarrod,
>>>>>
>>>>> Noting your exchange with Martin, Martin brings up a point that
>>>>> certainly I missed, which is that somehow the tilde ('~') character
>>>>> got into the chain of events. As Martin noted, on Linuxen/Unixen
>>>>> (including OSX), the tilde, when used in the context of file name
>>>>> globbing, refers to your home directory. Thus, a command such as:
>>>>>
>>>>>  ls ~
>>>>>
>>>>> will list the files in your home directory. Similarly:
>>>>>
>>>>>  rm ~
>>>>>
>>>>> will remove the files there as well. If the -rf argument is added,
>>>>> then the deletion becomes recursive through that directory tree,
>>>>> which appears to be the case here.
>>>>>
>>>>> I am unclear, as Martin appears to be, as to the steps that caused
>>>>> this to happen. That may yet be related in some fashion to Duncan's
>>>>> hypothesis.
>>>>>
>>>>> That being said, the use of the tilde character as a suffix to
>>>>> denote that a file is a backup version, is not limited to Fedora or
>>>>> Linux, for that matter. It is quite common for many text editors
>>>>> (eg. Emacs) to use this. As a result, it is also common for many
>>>>> applications to ignore files that have a tilde suffix.
>>>>>
>>>>> Based upon your follow up posts to the original thread, it would
>>>>> seem that you do not have any backups. The default ext3 file system
>>>>> that is used on modern Linuxen, by design, makes it a bit more
>>>>> difficult to recover deleted files. This is due to the unlinking of
>>>>> file metadata at the file system data structure level, as opposed to
>>>>> simply marking the file as deleted in the directory structures, as
>>>>> happens on Windows.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is a utility called ext3undel
>>>>> (http://projects.izzysoft.de/trac/ext3undel ), which is a wrapper of
>>>>> sorts to other undelete utilities such as PhotoRec and foremost. I
>>>>> have not used it/them, so cannot speak from personal experience. Thus
>>>>> it would be a good idea to engage in some reviews of the
>>>>> documentation and perhaps other online resources before proceeding.
>>>>> The other
>>>>> consideration is the Catch-22 of not copying anything new to your
>>>>> existing HD, for fear of overwriting the lost files with new data. So
>>>>> you would need to consider an approach of downloading these utilities
>>>>> via another computer and then running them on the computer in
>>>>> question from other media, such as a CD/DVD or USB HD.
>>>>>
>>>>> A more expensive option would be to use a professional data recovery
>>>>> service, where you would have to consider the cost of recovery
>>>>> versus your lost time. One option would be Kroll OnTrack UK
>>>>> (http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.co.uk/ ). I happen to live about a
>>>>> quarter mile from their world HQ here in a suburb of Minneapolis. I
>>>>> have not used them myself, but others that I know have, with good
>>>>> success. Again, this comes at a
>>>>> potentially substantial monetary cost.
>>>>>
>>>>> The key is that if you have any hope to recover the deleted files,
>>>>> you not copy anything new onto the hard drive in the mean time.
>>>>> Doing so will decrease the possibility of file recovery to near 0.
>>>>>
>>>>> As Duncan noted, there is great empathy with your situation. We have
>>>>> all gone through this at one time or another. In my case, it was
>>>>> perhaps 20+ years ago, but as a result, I am quite anal retentive
>>>>> about having backups, which I have done for some time on my systems,
>>>>> hourly.
>>>>>
>>>>> HTH,
>>>>>
>>>>> Marc Schwartz
>>>>>
>>>>> On Jul 28, 2010, at 5:55 AM, Jarrod Hadfield wrote:
>>>>>> Hi Martin,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I think this is the most likely reason given that the name in the
>>>>>> DESCRIPTION file does NOT have a version number. Even so, it is
>>>>>> very easy to misname a file and then delete it/change its name (as
>>>>>> I've done here) and I hope current versions of R would not cause
>>>>>> this problem. Perhaps Fedora should not use ~ as its back up file
>>>>>> suffixes?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Jarrod
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 28 Jul 2010, at 11:41, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>> Jarrod Hadfield <j.hadfield at ed.ac.uk>
>>>>>>>>>>>>  on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:37:09 +0100 writes:
>>>>>>>> Hi, I ran R (version 2.9.0) CMD build under root in
>>>>>>>> Fedora (9). When it tried to remove "junk files" it
>>>>>>>> removed EVERYTHING in my local account! (See below).
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Can anyone tell me what happened,
>>>>>>> the culprit may lay here:
>>>>>>>>> * removing junk files
>>>>>>>>> unlink MCMCglmm_2.05/R/   residuals.MCMCglmm.R
>>>>>>>>> ~
>>>>>>> where it seems that someone (you?) have added a newline
>>>>>>> in the filname, so instead of
>>>>>>> 'residuals.MCMCglmm.R~'
>>>>>>> you got
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> 'residuals.MCMCglmm.R
>>>>>>> ~'
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> and the unlink / rm  command interpreted '~' as your home
>>>>>>> directory.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> But I can hardly believe it.
>>>>>>> This seems explanation seems a bit doubtful to me.. ...
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> and even more importantly if I can I restore what was lost.
>>>>>>> well, you just get it from the backup. You do daily backups, do
>>>>>>> you?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>>> Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich
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>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented,
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> 
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