gdal_utils may crash the R session

[agila5]

Dear sf developers, I noticed that when I run the vectortranslate utility in gdal_utils with misspecified options and quiet = FALSE, the R session crashes. For example, the following code returns a warning:

# packages
library(sf)
#> Linking to GEOS 3.9.0, GDAL 3.2.1, PROJ 7.2.1

# data
osm <- system.file("osm/overpass.osm", package = "sf")
gpkg <- tempfile(fileext = ".gpkg")

# vectortranslate
gdal_utils(
  util = "vectortranslate", 
  source = osm, 
  destination = gpkg, 
  options = c("-oo", "USE_CUSTOM_INDEXING=NO", "-lines")
)
#> Warning in CPL_gdalvectortranslate(source, destination, options, oo, doo, : GDAL
#> Error 6: Unknown option name '-lines'

^{Created on 2021-05-25 by the reprex package (v2.0.0)}

Session info

sessioninfo::session_info()
#> - Session info ---------------------------------------------------------------
#>  setting  value                       
#>  version  R version 4.0.5 (2021-03-31)
#>  os       Windows 10 x64              
#>  system   x86_64, mingw32             
#>  ui       RTerm                       
#>  language en                          
#>  collate  Italian_Italy.1252          
#>  ctype    Italian_Italy.1252          
#>  tz       Europe/Berlin               
#>  date     2021-05-25                  
#> 
#> - Packages -------------------------------------------------------------------
#>  package     * version date       lib source        
#>  assertthat    0.2.1   2019-03-21 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  backports     1.2.1   2020-12-09 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.3)
#>  class         7.3-18  2021-01-24 [2] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  classInt      0.4-3   2020-04-07 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  cli           2.5.0   2021-04-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  crayon        1.4.1   2021-02-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  DBI           1.1.1   2021-01-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  digest        0.6.27  2020-10-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  dplyr         1.0.6   2021-05-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  e1071         1.7-7   2021-05-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  ellipsis      0.3.2   2021-04-29 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  evaluate      0.14    2019-05-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  fansi         0.5.0   2021-05-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  fs            1.5.0   2020-07-31 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  generics      0.1.0   2020-10-31 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  glue          1.4.2   2020-08-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  highr         0.9     2021-04-16 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  htmltools     0.5.1.1 2021-01-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  KernSmooth    2.23-18 2020-10-29 [2] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  knitr         1.32    2021-04-14 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  lifecycle     1.0.0   2021-02-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  magrittr      2.0.1   2020-11-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  pillar        1.6.1   2021-05-16 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  pkgconfig     2.0.3   2019-09-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  proxy         0.4-25  2021-03-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  purrr         0.3.4   2020-04-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  R6            2.5.0   2020-10-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  Rcpp          1.0.6   2021-01-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  reprex        2.0.0   2021-04-02 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  rlang         0.4.11  2021-04-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  rmarkdown     2.7     2021-02-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  sessioninfo   1.1.1   2018-11-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  sf          * 0.9-8   2021-03-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  stringi       1.5.3   2020-09-09 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.3)
#>  stringr       1.4.0   2019-02-10 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  styler        1.4.1   2021-03-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  tibble        3.1.2   2021-05-16 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  tidyselect    1.1.1   2021-04-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  units         0.7-1   2021-03-16 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  utf8          1.2.1   2021-03-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)
#>  vctrs         0.3.8   2021-04-29 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  withr         2.4.2   2021-04-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  xfun          0.23    2021-05-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  yaml          2.2.1   2020-02-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.3)
#> 
#> [1] C:/Users/Utente/Documents/R/win-library/4.0
#> [2] C:/Program Files/R/R-4.0.5/library

while the equivalent code with quiet = FALSE in gdal_utils crashes the R session (I cannot add a reprex). I know that the problem is related to the options set by the user, but I think that it shouldn't crash the session.

[edzer]

Thanks - yes, rather obvious but not clear from the GDAL docs...

[agila5]

Thank you for the quick fix!