[R-SIG-Mac] Help, R crashes on startup

[David Winsemius]

On Jun 21, 2010, at 10:34 AM, Julie Falcon wrote:

> Dear "R team",
>
> I am a regular user of R as a social scientist, and since last  
> friday for the first time I've been facing serious problems using R  
> on a Mac computer.
>
> I couldn't launch anymore R, it was cashing before it could open.  
> I've searched on the internet to find solutions to my problem. In  
> the first instance, it was useful, I realised that the file  
> "history.txt" was the cause of the crash (http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html#R_002eapp-GUI-crashes-on-startup_0021 
> ).
> So, I removed it and R worked again until... this morning.
>
> I am facing the same problem again, although I can't identify  
> anymore the reason of the crash. This is not caused by "history.txt"  
> file, nor by "workspace.rdata". I've reinstalled several times the R  
> application (the lastest one, ie. 2.11.1 as well as an older version  
> 2.8.1) but this doesn't change anything.
>
> I don't know what to do, therefore I email you to ask you if you  
> could help me.
>
> I've attached a "R crash report" that may help you, but it was  
> generated by my computer, not by R (I couldn't find a R crash.log).

Neither "history.txt" nor "workspace.rdata" are typical sites of  
corrupted workspaces. The default workspace is a "dot file", i.e. one  
whose name begins with a <dot> (= "."), named ".Rdata". These files  
are not visible in the Finder unless you change the behavior to show  
them. There are many sets of instructions for doing this that will  
come up on a Google search. The other method would be to open a  
Terminal window and:

rm ~/.Rdata

I do not think that corrupted history files are quite so common a  
cause, but getting rid of the default history file could be done in a  
Terminal session with:

rm ~/.Rhistory

-- 
David.

>
> I hope this can help you.
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Julie Falcon
> Université de Lausanne
>
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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT