Remove temporary sanitized file when process is manually stopped in RStudio

[jonocarroll]

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If an input Rmd filename contains invalid characters (e.g. spaces; this is my filename.Rmd) then a temporary copy of the file with a sanitized filename is used when knitting (this-is-my-filename.Rmd) which is removed on completion. If the knit process is not completed (due to an error within a chunk) then this file is removed correctly (presumably via an on.exit()).

In RStudio, if the process is stopped via the Stop button then this hyphenated Rmd file is not deleted, and it blocks attempting to knit the file again, triggering the following (potentially confusing to the user, but entirely accurate) error

Error: The name of the input file cannot contain the special shell characters: [ <>()|\:&;#?*'] 
(attempted to copy to a version without those characters 'this-is-my-filename.Rmd' 
however that file already exists)
Execution halted

(possibly the issue causing #1110).

I don't fully appreciate how this RStudio button connects to the process of knitting, and this may actually be an RStudio bug (in which case I'm happy to re-file it over there), but perhaps there's another on.exit() to add here. I agree with the assessment in #1110 that this file shouldn't be overwritten, but if it was created as part of a failed knit, it should ideally be deleted.

The 'proper' solution would be that users don't create filenames containing these characters. One could dream.

xfun::session_info('knitr')

R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Monterey 12.6, RStudio 2022.2.3.492

Locale: en_AU.UTF-8 / en_AU.UTF-8 / en_AU.UTF-8 / C / en_AU.UTF-8 / en_AU.UTF-8

Package version:
evaluate_0.16 glue_1.6.2 graphics_4.2.1 grDevices_4.2.1 highr_0.9 knitr_1.40.2 magrittr_2.0.3 methods_4.2.1 stats_4.2.1 stringi_1.7.8
stringr_1.4.0 tools_4.2.1 utils_4.2.1 xfun_0.32 yaml_2.3.5

[yihui]

This is not relevant to knitr but rmarkdown and RStudio IDE. More likely to be an RStudio issue. In rmarkdown, the sanitized file is generated here: https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/blob/f764a66d20768750ca6c2adac18f6830e665a9ca/R/render.R#L367 and cleaned up here (via on.exit()): https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/blob/f764a66d20768750ca6c2adac18f6830e665a9ca/R/render.R#L324

It sounds like on.exit() is not executed in this case if you click the Stop button in RStudio.

[jonocarroll]

Thank you - that looks to be the case. I'll move this over to RStudio. Sorry for the noise.

[yihui]

No worries. I tried to come up with a minimal reproducible example without rmarkdown, but didn't manage to create one.

[yihui]

For the record, we have also run into a similar issue before in bookdown: rstudio/bookdown#986 (comment)

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