[Rd] copy-before-ignore in R CMD build

[Kevin Ushey]

This was filed on the bug tracker some time ago here:

https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17549

but (at least at the time) it seemed there wasn't any appetite to
implement this on the R side.

For what it's worth, one way to handle this locally is to put your own
version of 'cp' on the PATH, and have that ignore certain files /
directories when copying files. This is what I've been using
successfully for some time

https://gist.github.com/kevinushey/2351194ba540627831fa2d58073c097a

but I agree it would be nice to have this, or something similar,
implemented in R itself.

Best,
Kevin

On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 11:36 AM Ben Bolker <bbolker using gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   As currently implemented, R CMD build copies everything in the package
> directory to a working directory, then unlinks those in .Rbuildignore
> (see this comment by Jim Hester from 2018).
>
> https://github.com/r-lib/rcmdcheck/issues/90#issuecomment-435938362
>
>    If one accidentally happens :-( to create a directory with many
> gigabytes of junk in it, say from reverse-dependency-checking a widely
> used package, then the presence of that directory (even if
> .Rbuildignore'd) will make R CMD build hang as it tries to copy the
> contents of the directory ...
>
>    I realize it's considerably more complicated to skip .Rbuildignore'd
> files in the process of copying (I don't see offhand how to do it
> without some fairly fancy unix-`find`-like tool, as opposed to a
> straight-up `file.copy(..., recursive = TRUE)`, but I wonder if there's
> any appetite for changing this behaviour?
>
>    cheers
>     Ben Bolker
>
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