[R-SIG-Mac] Failure of CLI with .Rprofile on Mac OS X

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 21/09/2014 00:25, David Winsemius wrote:
>
> On Sep 20, 2014, at 2:15 PM, peter dalgaard wrote:
>
>> Notice that we have a similar, but unresolved, bug report a month old.
>>
>> https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15940
>>
>> I assume that the obvious things like a .Rprofile in the current directory has been checked?
>>
>> Running R under a debugger, single-stepping through the startup code would likely isolate the trouble, but it's a bit of work to set up, and of course it needs to be on the machine that actually displays the problem.
>>
>> -pd
>>
>> On 20 Sep 2014, at 21:27 , David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> snipped
>
>>>
>>> Caveat: I'm not the best person to answer this. I'm not a skilled user of Unix and I'm not one of the Mac development team. But those guys are often not reading the mailing list on weekends so I thought I'd throw some ideas out that you could investigate.
>
>
>
>>> I haven't been able to find exactly what PWD is pointing to. It's not listed in the "environment variables" link from ?Sys.getenv. I think it's related tot eh[sic] Unix cli command `pwd` which prints the working directory.
>
> Peter;
>
> Do you know whether the "PWD" value in the result from  Sys.getenv() is supposed to point at the working directory of R started from the command line?
>

There are too many variables here to say for certain.  The 'command 
line' is a shell, but the user can choose what that is.  (For 
Terminal.app, it is in the Startup preferences.)  The command 'cd' 
normally sets the environment variable PWD, but there are variants for 
different shells, and /usr/bin/cd which calls the builtin 'cd' in the 
current shell.  (The POSIX command 'pwd' can also set PWD, and that too 
can be a shell builtin.)

The user can also set PWD, both in the shell and from inside R.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK