[R] R CMD build wiped my computer

[R P Herrold]

On Wed, 28 Jul 2010, Jarrod Hadfield wrote:

> My main concern is that this could happen again and that the 
> "bug" is not limited to R 2.9. I would think that an 
> accidental carriage return at the end of a file name (even a 
> temporary one) would be a reasonably common phenomenon (I'm 
> surprised I hadn't done it before).

This is a well known attribute of buildsystems generally. 
Inadvertent errors can cause local damage, and so the 
recommendation to build in a 'chroot' or in a different 
userid.  Ditto the initial speculation as to you building as 
root (another common beginner mistake)

Malicious code can 'crawl out of a chroot' as well and wander 
through a system, or evade checking tools so as to be able to 
later emerge once in production, but this thread then goes 
afield from R

-- Russ herrold