[R-SIG-Mac] help difficulties on
Marc Schwartz
marc_schwartz at me.com
Wed Feb 10 23:46:12 CET 2010
On Feb 10, 2010, at 3:44 PM, Ben Bolker wrote:
> Dear R-sig-Mac'ers:
>
> I'm posting on behalf of a student who is having trouble with
> accessing the help files in R.app (I think) on MacOS X.4 (I think
> X.4.11?) . The basic symptom is that in a clean R session she gets
> results like this:
>
>> ?plot
> Error in file(out, "wt") : cannot open the connection
>
> This is generic (i.e. happens with any help request). After a bit
> more poking around we triggered
>
> 2010-02-09 15:20:21.010 R[16728] *** Exception handlers were not
> properly removed. Some code has jumped or returned out of an
> NS_DURING...NS_HANDLER region without using the NS_VOIDRETURN or
> NS_VALUERETURN macros.
> R(16728,0xa000ed88) malloc: *** error for object 0x3b610038:
> Non-aligned pointer being freed
> R(16728,0xa000ed88) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to
> debug
> R(16728,0xa000ed88) malloc: *** Deallocation of a pointer not
> malloced: 0x41d60; This could be a double free(), or free() called
> with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment
> variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug
>
> We have both tried searching/googling for this particular problem,
> without success -- found a fair amount about issues with help.start()
> when running firewalls, but nothing that seemed to match our situation.
>
> * Does this ring any bells for anyone? Have we missed something
> obvious (I hope)? What are the next steps in the
> diagnostic/troubleshooting pathway?
>
> * Is there a searchable version of the R-sig-mac archives?
> Rsitesearch doesn't seem to offer it, and the R-sig-mac archives seem to
> be available only month-by-month (& not searchable), as far as I can tell.
>
> thanks,
> Ben Bolker
>
Ben
I'll defer to Simon on the debugging part, as he has already engaged, other than to say, if this is a permissions issue, you can run the OSX Disk Utility:
Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility
and run the Repair Disk Permissions process (on the First Aid tab) on the disk to see if that helps.
With respect to generally searching the list archives, I use:
http://www.rseek.org
which includes the R-SIG-* lists in addition to r-help and r-devel.
HTH,
Marc Schwartz
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