[R-SIG-Mac] Word / OS X / R

[Ben Bond-Lamberty]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:26 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> On Sep 12, 2011, at 2:43 PM, Dennis Fisher wrote:
>
>> R 2.13.1
>> OS X. 10.6.8
>> Colleagues,
>>
>> I just encountered an interesting Word / OS X / R interaction problem.
>>  Situation is:
>>        1.  I have an open RTF file
>>        2.  From R:
>>                a.  I delete the file (confirmed)
>>                b.  I create a new RTF file with the same name
>> (successfully)
>>                c.  I attempt to open the new RTF file
>> Word hangs (a recursive message that it can't open the file -- it must be
>> corrupt), presumably because the original file was open in Word, despite
>> being deleted from the drive.
>
> Sounds more like a Microsoft error. File locking (or lack thereof) varies
> across OSes. BSD is more permissive than System V. It is not the default on
> BSD Unix.
>
>>
>> Any ideas on how to solve this?  Is there some method (from R or from the
>> OS) to detect which files Word has open?   If so, I could avoid creating the
>> new file if the original one was open.
>> Interestingly, I presume that this would not happen in Windows because
>> step 2a could not happen if the file were open.
>
>
> http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/10.5/man2/flock.2.html
>
> I suppose you need to determine by experimentation whether MS-Word sets any
> flags that system utilities can access.
>
>
>> Dennis

I can't reproduce this using Word 2011 (v14.1.2 (110505)), R 2.13.1,
and 10.6.8. Word closes and re-opens the file without complaint.

> I suppose you need to determine by experimentation whether MS-Word sets any
> flags that system utilities can access.

You could also, from R, call lsof (e.g., "system( "lsof | grep foo" )
) to explicitly check if Word, or any other program, has the file
open.

Ben