[ESS] starting directory not detected correctly anymore

[Paul Johnson]

Greetings.

I want to have ESS know the working directory from shell pwd, I don't
want it to ask me.

I have a setting in my init.el that used to work that way:

;; start R in current working directory, don't let R ask user:
(setq ess-ask-for-ess-directory nil)

Recently, it has stopped working. The symptom of the problem is that
the R session working directory trims off the last element in the
path. This is in Ubuntu 17.04 with emacs 24.5.1 and ess 17.11.

When I open a file from command line, say in

$ cd ~/tmp/R/
$ emacs testme.R

and then I hit the bug blue icon to start R, then getwd() shows
"~/tmp". The last element in the path is lost.  Same happens if I
start R with "Alt-x R", so don't hate me for liking your pretty blue R
button.

I notice that M-x eshell gets it right, it opens a shell in the /R
directory (the correct one). Also Emacs File "Open Directory" also
gets it right. Its just the inferior ESS *R* session that doesn't get
it right.

If I remove that line from init.el, then the ESS process stops and
asks me what directory what I want and it always guesses correctly.

I never saw this happen before today when opening a pre-existing R
file from the shell.  I have seem similar in past if I have an Emacs
session open and close the R session and re-start a new R session
without closing Emacs.  That second instance almost always has lost
the "R" from the file path, and shows the parent directory.

Would somebody try it and tell me if I've just gone all the way off
the cliff toward crazy?

Suggestions welcome (except concerning cliffs), thanks as usual.

pj


-- 
Paul E. Johnson   http://pj.freefaculty.org
Director, Center for Research Methods and Data Analysis http://crmda.ku.edu

To write to me directly, please address me at pauljohn at ku.edu.