[R-SIG-Mac] help difficulties on

[Marc Schwartz]

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