From ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk  Tue Apr  3 07:06:47 2001
From: ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian D Ripley)
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 07:06:47 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] lstat and NFS server not responding
In-Reply-To: <3AC916F5.373D48A7@bank-banque-canada.ca>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0104030657280.22896-100000@auk.stats>

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> In a somewhat unusual circumstance I have been having trouble when
> making R from source and with "R CMD build dse"
> forcing the machine to look for an NFS server which was not available,
> and then stalling. Our system administrator traced this back to the fact
> that these go through all the directories back to "/" , doing an lstat
> on everything. He suggests that that seems odd, but it doesn't take long
> normally.  The problem was apparently caused by the fact that something
> (possible a cdrom) on /mnt had not been unmounted properly.
>
> We have fixed the problem but since it was rather difficult to track
> down I thought  I would point it out in case others experience a similar
> difficulty. Also, is there a good explanation for doing an lstat on
> everything up to /?

Do you know what was doing it?  Since R CMD build is basically a Perl
program, I can only guess that Perl was doing this, and it looks like a
Perl quirk/bug that perhaps you need to track down and report (if your Perl
version is current).  One thing I did notice is that the R scripts use
Cwd::getcwd in Perl when the manual page recommends Cwd::cwd, and reading
the code suggests Cwd::getcwd is the culprit.  (Any explanation,
Fritz/Kurt?)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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[Rd] lstat and NFS server not responding
Prof Brian D Ripley