Inspired by http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7487778/could-you-tell-me-what-this-error-means
I wrote the following very small (one-line) patch which returns an *informative* error message when R tries to load a zero-byte file rather than Error in if (!grepl("RD[AX]2\n", magic)) { : argument is of length zero I would guess that error messages with the word "magic" in them would be disturbing to new users, who are probably worried already that R is magic ... Ben Bolker
Index: load.R =================================================================== --- load.R (revision 56743) +++ load.R (working copy) @@ -25,6 +25,7 @@ ## Since the connection is not open this opens it in binary mode ## and closes it again. magic <- readChar(con, 5L, useBytes = TRUE) + if (length(magic)==0) stop("empty (zero-byte) file") if (!grepl("RD[AX]2\n", magic)) { ## a check while we still know the call to load() if(grepl("RD[ABX][12]\r", magic))
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