FWIW, I tried it on my linux box. The memory use shot through the roof, the system crawled to a halt due to constant swapping, and after a minute or so top showed memory use of 47GB, at which point I killed the R process. On linux at least R is not frozen but the strsplit call gobbles up memory (and does not seem to end) which makes it look like it's frozen.
Peter > sessionInfo() R version 3.4.1 Patched (2017-08-11 r73090) Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit) Running under: Fedora 26 (Twenty Six) Matrix products: default BLAS: /usr/local/atlas/lib/libtatlas.so LAPACK: /usr/local/lib64/R-3.4.1-patched-atlas-parallel/lib/libRlapack.so locale: [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] compiler_3.4.1 On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 3:31 PM, Chris Triggs <cm.tri...@auckland.ac.nz> wrote: > Hi... > > I have come upon a problem with a regular expression which causes base-R > to freeze. I have reproduced the phenomenon on several machines running R > under Windows 10, and also under OSX on different Apple MACs. > > The minimal example is:- > Oldterm is a vector of characters, e.g. "A", "B", "A", "*", "B" > The regular expression is "\\\\)" > > The call which freezes R is > strsplit(Oldterm, "\\\\)" ) > > Thomas - after he had reproduced the problem - suggested that I submit it > to r-devel. > > Best wishes.... > Chris Triggs > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel