[Rd] Bug 17159 - recursive dir.create() fails on windows shares due to permissions

[Joris Meys]

Hi all,

I ran into this exact issue yesterday during the exam of statistical
computing. Users can install packages in a user library that R tries to
create automatically on the network drive of the student. But that doesn't
happen as the unc path is not read correctly, leading to R attempting to
create a local directory and being told it has no right to do so.

That is an older version of R though (3.3), but I'm wondering whether I
would ask our IT department to just update R on all these computers to the
latest version, or if we have to look for another solution.

Cheers
Joris

On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 1:43 PM, Thompson, Pete <Pete.Thompson at iqvia.com>
wrote:

> Hi, I’d like to ask about bug 17159:
>
> https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17159
>
> I can confirm that I see exactly this bug when using dir.create on paths
> of UNC form (\\server\share\xxx), with the recursive flag set. I’m seeing
> this when attempting to use install.packages with such a path (which I know
> isn’t supported, but would be great if it was!). I can see that a patch has
> been suggested for the problem and from looking at the source code I
> believe it’s a correct fix. Is there a possibility of getting this patch
> included?
>
> The existing logic for Windows recursive dir.create (platform.c lines
> 2209-22203) appears to be:
> - Skip over any \\share at the start of the directory name
> - Loop while there are pieces of directory name left (i.e. we haven’t hit
> the last \ character)
>   = Find the next portion of the directory name (up to the next \
> character)
>   = Attempt to create the directory (unless it is of the form x: - i.e. a
> drive name)
>   = Ignore any ‘already exists’ errors, otherwise throw an error
>
> This logic appears flawed in that it skips \\share which isn’t a valid
> path format (according to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
> us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx ). Dredging my memory,
> it’s possible that \\share was a supported format in very old versions of
> Windows, but it’s been a long time since the UNC format came in. It’s also
> possible that \\share is a valid format in some odd environments, but the
> UNC format is far more widely used.
>
> The patch suggested by Evan Cortens is simply to change the skip logic to
> skip over \\server\share instead of \\share. This will certainly fix the
> common use case of using UNC paths, but doesn’t attempt to deal with all
> the more complex options in Microsoft’s documentation. I doubt many users
> would ask for the complex cases, but the basic UNC format would be of wide
> applicability.
>
> Thanks
> Pete Thompson
> Director, Information Technology
> Head of Spotfire Centre of Excellence
> IQVIA
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Joris Meys
Statistical consultant

Department of Data Analysis and Mathematical Modelling
Ghent University
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