[Rd] Detect a terminated pipe

[Simon Urbanek]

On Mar 14, 2014, at 11:03 AM, Kirill Müller <kirill.mueller at ivt.baug.ethz.ch> wrote:

> On 03/14/2014 03:54 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>> As far as R is concerned, the connection is open. In addition, pipes exist even without the process - you can close one end of a pipe and it will still exist (that’s what makes pipes useful, actually, because you can choose to close arbitrary combination of the R/W ends). Detecting that the other end of the pipe has closed is generally done by sending/receiving data to/from the end of interest - i.e. reading from a pipe that has closed the write end on the other side will yield 0 bytes read. Writing to a pipe that has closed the read end on the other side will yield SIGPIPE error (note that for text connections you have to call flush() to send the buffer):
>> 
>>> >p=pipe("true","r")
>>> >readLines(p)
>> character(0)
>>> >close(p)
>>> >p=pipe("true","w")
>>> >writeLines("", p)
>>> >flush(p)
>> Error in flush.connection(p) : ignoring SIGPIPE signal
>>> >close(p)
> Thanks for your reply. I tried this in an R console and received the error, just like you described. Unfortunately, the error is not thrown when trying the same in RStudio. Any ideas?
> 

RStudio is not R, so it’s possible that they catch signals and fail to distinguish their use from R’s eating the signal before R can get it. I would suggest filing a bug report with RStudio.

Cheers,
Simon