[R] meta-question about R

m.roth at 5-cent.us m.roth at 5-cent.us
Wed Apr 23 23:28:36 CEST 2014


Jim Lemon wrote:
> On 04/23/2014 11:58 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>> This really isn't about R, but configuring R. We're running R 3.0.2-1,
>> the current default package, on CentOS 6.5 On a long-running job, R is
>> creating files in /dev/shm: each set of three files are named (8 hex
>> digits)-(4 hex digits)-(4 hex digits)-(4 hex digits)-(12 hex digits),
>> and then sem.(same as the name)_counter_mutex, and (same as the
>> name)_counter.
>>
>> For example,
>> 156d23b0-9e67-46e2-afab-14a648252890
>> 156d23b0-9e67-46e2-afab-14a648252890_counter
>> sem.156d23b0-9e67-46e2-afab-14a648252890_counter_mutex
>>
>> Is there some way to configure R to add a prefix, say, to each of these
>> files? We're running rkhunter (rootkit hunter) for security, and it
>> complains about suspicious files, and I'd like some way to be able to
>> tell it to, say, ignore R_temp.whatever....
>>
> I assume that the problem is to identify the files in /dev/shm, not to
> simply change your R code to tack the prefix onto the files as it
> produces them. As your hexadecimal digits are probably randomly

Um, no - it's to get R to change its naming std. for /dev/shm files.
rkhunter is a program that looks for rootkits. I cannot give it a shell or
other scripting language command to run; rather, I can only give it
filenames, or wildcarded filenames in its configuration file. Ideally, I'd
like, as I said, to have the files named something like R_<hex name),
sem.R_<hex name>_whatever.

And I am a tad leery of just telling it that /dev/shm/* is ok, because
there is malware out there that will put its executable in /dev/shm so as
to remove the traces of it after you reboot to recover....

        mark




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