[R] RData loading weirdness

[Barry Rowlingson]

  I've just had an interesting thing happen to one of our students. He's 
using R 1.9.1 on Linux, and so I dont expect bugfixes, I'm just 
reporting this out of interest in case anyone else has had this happen.

  Starting R caused a seg fault shortly after "[Previously saved 
workspace restored]". Running "R --no-restore-data" worked fine so I 
suspected a corrupted .RData. It was 67M big, with about 400 objects - 
nothing extreme there. But then doing load(".RData") worked fine. There 
were his objects. How strange.

  I deleted the first 200 objects, saved the .RData, and retried. That 
worked, so I thought it might have been an object in the last 200 or so. 
So I saved them to .RData. Starting up with that worked.

  So, starting afresh with the original load(".RData"), I saved two 
.RData files with each part. Quit, start again, load("part1.RData") and 
load("part2.RData"), then quit and save. Now I had all 400-ish objects 
in one .RData. Time to start R and see if it can startup with it.

  And it did. Worked fine. So I suspect a subtle bug in reading .RData 
files or subtle corruption in the .RData. Most odd. Oh well, I guess I 
could see what R 2.x.x does with it....

Barry