NEWS.md

processx (development version)

processx 3.8.4

• No changes.

processx 3.8.3

• *printf() format strings are now safer (#379).

processx 3.8.2

• The client library, used by callr, now ignores SIGPIPE when writing to a file descriptor, on unix. This avoid possible freezes when a callr::r_session subprocess is trying to report its result after the main process was terminated. In particular, this happened with parallel testthat: r-lib/testthat#1819

processx 3.8.1

• On Unixes, R processes created by callr now feature a SIGTERM cleanup handler that cleans up the temporary directory before shutting down. To enable it, set the PROCESSX_R_SIGTERM_CLEANUP envvar to a non-empty value.

processx 3.8.0

• processx error stacks are better now. They have ANSI hyperlinks for function calls to their manual pages, and they also print operators better.

• processx now does not mark standard streams as close-on-exec on Unix, as this causes problems when calling system() from an R subprocess (r-lib/callr#236).

processx 3.7.0

• New functions for creating portable FIFOs and Unix socket connections. See conn_create_fifo(), conn_create_unix_socket() and vignettes/internals.Rmd for documentation. These functions are currently experimental.

processx 3.6.1

• processx now closes file unneeded file descriptors when redirecting the standard output and error, in the client file.

• processx errors now do not have rlang_error and rlang_trace classes, because they are actually not compatible with rlang errors and traces.

processx 3.6.0

• processx now gives better error messages, and better stack traces.

processx 3.5.3

• run() now sets stderr to NULL in the result (instead of an empty string), if the standard error was redirected to the standard output. This also fixes an error when interrupting a run() with a redirected standard error.

• processx now does not fail if the current working directory contains a non-ASCII character on Windows, and getwd() returns a short path for it (#313).

processx 3.5.2

• run() now does not truncate stdout and stderr when the output contains multibyte characters (#298, @infotroph).

• processx now compiles with custom compilers that enable OpenMP (#297).

• processx now avoids a race condition when the working directory is changed right after starting a process, potentially before the sub-process is initialized (#300).

• processx now works with non-ASCII path names on non-UTF-8 Unix platforms (#293).

processx 3.5.1

• Fix a potential failure when polling curl file descriptors on Windows.

processx 3.5.0

• You can now append environment variables to the ones set in the current process if you include "current" in the value of env, in run() and for process$new(): env = c("current", NEW = "newvalue") (#232).

• Sub-processes can now inherit the standard input, output and error from the main R process, by setting the corresponding argument to an empty string. E.g. run("ls", stdout = "") (#72).

• run() is now much faster with large standard output or standard error (#286).

• run() can now discard the standard output and error or redirect them to file(s), instead of collecting them.

• processx now optionally uses the cli package to color error messages and stack traces, instead of crayon.

processx 3.4.5

• New options in pty_options to set the initial size of the pseudo terminal.

• Reading the standard output or error now does not crash occasionally when a \n character is at the beginning of the input buffer (#281).

processx 3.4.4

• processx now works correctly for non-ASCII commands and arguments passed in the native encoding, on Windows (#261, #262, #263, #264).

• Providing multiple environment variables now works on windows (#267).

processx 3.4.3

• The supervisor (activated with supervise = TRUE) does not crash on the Windows Subsystem on Linux (WSL) now (#222).

• Fix ABI compatibility for pre and post R 4.0.1 versions. Now CRAN builds (with R 4.0.2 and later 4.0.x) work well on R 4.0.0.

• Now processx can run commands on UNC paths specified with forward slashes: //hostname/... UNC paths with the usual back-slashes were always fine (#249).

• The $as_ps_handle() method works now better; previously it sometimes created an invalid ps::ps_handle object, if the system clock has changed (#258).

processx 3.4.2

• run() now does a better job with displaying the spinner on terminals that buffer the output (#223).

• Error messages are now fully printed after an error. In non-interactive sessions, the stack trace is printed as well.

• Further improved error messages. Errors from C code now include the name of the C function, and errors that belong to a process include the system command (#197).

• processx does not crash now if the process receives a SIGPIPE signal when trying to write to a pipe, of which the other end has already exited.

• processx now to works better with fork clusters from the parallel package. See 'Mixing processx and the parallel base R package' in the README file (#236).

• processx now does no block SIGCHLD by default in the subprocess, blocking potentially causes zombie sub-subprocesses (#240).

• The process$wait() method now does not leak file descriptors on Unix when interrupted (#141).

processx 3.4.1

• Now run() does not create an ok variable in the global environment.

processx 3.4.0

• Processx has now better error messages, in particular, all errors from C code contain the file name and line number, and the system error code and message (where applicable).

• Processx now sets the .Last.error variable for every un-caught processx error to the error condition, and also sets .Last.error.trace to its stack trace.

• run() now prints the last 10 lines of the standard error stream on error, if echo = FALSE, and it also prints the exit status of the process.

• run() now includes the standard error in the condition signalled on interrupt.

• process now supports creating pseudo terminals on Unix systems.

• conn_create_pipepair() gets new argument to set the pipes as blocking or non-blocking.

• process does not set the inherited extra connections as blocking, and it also does not close them after starting the subprocess. This is now the responsibility of the user. Note that this is a breaking change.

• run() now passes extra ... arguments to process$new().

• run() now does not error if the process is killed in a callback.

processx 3.3.1

• Fix a crash on Windows, when a connection that has a pending read internally is finalized.

processx 3.3.0

• process can now redirect the standard error to the standard output, via specifying stderr = "2>&1". This works both with files and pipes.

• run() can now redirect the standard error to the standard output, via the new stderr_to_stdout argument.

• The $kill() and $kill_tree() methods get a close_connection = TRUE argument that closes all pipe connections of the process.

• run() now always kills the process (and its process tree if cleanup_tree is TRUE) before exiting. This also closes all pipe connections (#149).

processx 3.2.1

• processx does not depend on assertthat now, and the crayon package is now an optional dependency.

processx 3.2.0

• New process$kill_tree() method, and new cleanup_tree arguments in run() and process$new(), to clean up the process tree rooted at a processx process. (#139, #143).

• New process$interupt() method to send an interrupt to a process, SIGINT on Unix, CTRL+C on Windows (#127).

• New stdin argument in process$new() to support writing to the standard input of a process (#27, #114).

• New connections argument in process$new() to support passing extra connections to the child process, in addition to the standard streams.

• New poll_connection argument to process$new(), an extra connection that can be used to poll the process, even if stdout and stderr are not pipes (#125).

• poll() now works with connections objects, and they can be mixed with process objects (#121).

• New env argument in run() and process$new(), to set the environment of the child process, optionally (#117, #118).

• Removed the $restart() method, because it was less useful than expected, and hard to maintain (#116).

• New conn_set_stdout() and conn_set_stderr() to set the standard output or error of the calling process.

• New conn_disable_inheritance() to disable stdio inheritance. It is suggested that child processes call this immediately after starting, so the file handles are not inherited further.

• Fixed a signal handler bug on Unix that marked the process as finished, even if it has not (d221aa1f).

• Fixed a bug that occasionally caused crashes in wait(), on Unix (#138).

• When run() is interrupted, no error message is printed, just like for interruption of R code in general. The thrown condition now also has the interrupt class (#148).

processx 3.1.0

• Fix interference with the parallel package, and other packages that redefine the SIGCHLD signal handler on Unix. If the processx signal handler is overwritten, we might miss the exit status of some processes (they are set to NA).

• run() and process$new() allow specifying the working directory of the process (#63).

• Make the debugme package an optional dependency (#74).

• processx is now compatible with R 3.1.x.

• Allow polling more than 64 connections on Windows, by using IOCP instead of WaitForMultipleObjects() (#81, #106).

• Fix a race condition on Windows, when creating named pipes for stdout or stderr. The client sometimes didn't wait for the server, and processx failed with ERROR_PIPE_BUSY (231, All pipe instances are busy).

processx 3.0.3

• Fix a crash on windows when trying to run a non-existing command (#90)

• Fix a race condition in process$restart()

• run() and process$new() do not support the commandline argument any more, because process cleanup is error prone with an intermediate shell. (#88)

• processx process objects no longer use R connection objects, because the R connection API was retroactive made private by R-core processx uses its own connection class now to manage standard output and error of the process.

• The encoding of the standard output and error can be specified now, and processx re-encodes stdout and stderr in UTF-8.

• Cloning of process objects is disables now, as it is likely that it causes problems (@wch).

• supervise option to kill child process if R crashes (@wch).

• Add get_output_file and get_error_file, has_output_connection() and has_error_connection() methods (@wch).

• stdout and stderr default to NULL now, i.e. they are discarded (@wch).

• Fix undefined behavior when stdout/stderr was read out after the process was already finalized, on Unix.

• run(): Better message on interruption, kill process when interrupted.

• Unix: better kill count on unloading the package.

• Unix: make wait() work when SIGCHLD is not delivered for some reason.

• Unix: close inherited file descriptors more conservatively.

• Fix a race condition and several memory leaks on Windows.

• Fixes when running under job control that does not allow breaking away from the job, on Windows.

processx 2.0.0.1

This is an unofficial release, created by CRAN, to fix compilation on Solaris.

processx 2.0.0

First public release.