[R] Seek() on windows - safe use cases?

[Zhou Fang]

So, I'm maintaining some else's code, which is as always, a fun thing. One
feature of this code is the use of the 'seek' command.

In ?seek:

      We have found so many errors in the Windows implementation of file
      positioning that users are advised to use it only at their own
      risk, and asked not to waste the R developers' time with bug
      reports on Windows' deficiencies.

So, yeah. I guess my question would be this: are there any 'safe' use cases
of seek? I assume that doing anything unusual with it would be pretty bad,
but in this case, the file input is absolutely predictable, and so seek
seems a lot more convenient than the alternatives. 

Would, in particular, using seek to skip the first N bytes of an
uncompressed text file file being read in be consistent and reliable? The
references to seek problems in the dev mailing list seem mostly limited to
compressed files, or reading and writing files at the same time.

Zhou

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