[R] tryCatch() and preventing interrupts in 'finally'

[Luke Tierney]

More complete support for interrupt management is still on the to do
list, unfortunately.  onexit actions have similar issues (and have for
a long time).  What I was hoping to do is provide a user level
mechanism for turning off interrupts around a piece of code and then
optionally enabling them within the code.  It may make sense to adopt
that behavior for tryCatch as the detault, and maybe also for
functions with onexit actions.  There is a risk of deadlock if the
cleanup code goes into an infinite loop, but this may be better than
the current behavior of allowing interrutps in cleanup code.  There
are some nasty little issues involved in getting this right, which is
why it hasn't happened yet.

Best,

luke

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:

> With tryCatch() it is possible to catch interrupts with tryCatch(). Then you
> can use a 'finally' statement to clean up, release resources etc. However,
> how can I "protect" against additional interrupts? This is a concern when
> the hold down Ctrl+C and generates a sequence of interrupts. Example:
> 
> tryCatch({
>   cat("Press Ctrl+C...\n");
>   Sys.sleep(5);
> }, interrupt = function(interrupt) {
>   # ...and it will get caught
>   cat("Caugh an interrupt:\n");
>   print(interrupt);
> }, finally = {
>   cat("Trying to finalize. Press Ctrl+C...\n");
>   Sys.sleep(5);
>   cat("...and this line will not be evaluated.\n");
> })
> 
> Additional tryCatch() inside 'finally' will have the same problem and so.
> One idea I had was to wrap up the 'finally' statement in a
> withCallingHandlers(, interrupt=...), but it seems that
> withCallingHandlers() does not catch interrupts. For example, I tried to
> replace 'tryCatch' with 'withCallingHandlers' in the above code.
> 
> So, what I basically need is a way to turn off interrupts during the
> evaluation of 'finally' or a way for it to restart at the last interrupted
> point. Is this possible?
> 
> Thanks (again)!
> 
> Henrik Bengtsson
> 
> Dept. of Mathematical Statistics @ Centre for Mathematical Sciences 
> Lund Institute of Technology/Lund University, Sweden (+2h UTC)
> +46 46 2229611 (off), +46 708 909208 (cell), +46 46 2224623 (fax)
> h b @ m a t h s . l t h . s e, http://www.maths.lth.se/~hb/
> 
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-- 
Luke Tierney
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
   Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:      luke at stat.uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu