How to crash R?

Is there a simple way to trigger a crash in R? This is for testing purposes only, to see how a certain program that uses R in the background reacts to a crash and help determine if some rare problems are due to crashes or not.

Solution 1:

The easiest way is to call C-code. C provides a standard function abort()^[1] that does what you want. You need to call: .Call("abort").

As @Phillip pointed out you may need to load libc via:

• on Linux, dyn.load("/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6") before issuing .Call("abort"). The path may of course vary depending on your system.

• on OS X, dyn.load("/usr/lib/libc.dylib")

• on Windows (I just tested it on XP as I could not get hold of a newer version.) you will need to install Rtools^[2]. After that you should load dyn.load("C:/.../Rtools/bin/cygwin1.dll").

Solution 2:

There is an entire package on GitHub dedicated to this:

crash

R package that purposely crash an R session. WARNING: intended for test.

How to install a package from github is covered in other questions.

Solution 3:

I'm going to steal an idea from @Spacedman, but I'm giving him full conceptual credit by copying from his Twitter feed:

Segfault #rstats in one easy step: options(device=function(){});plot(1) reported Danger, will crash your R session. — Barry Rowlingson (@geospacedman) July 16, 2014

Solution 4:

As mentioned in a comment to your question, the minimal approach is a simple call to the system function abort(). One way to do this in one line is to

R> Rcpp::cppFunction('int crashMe(int ignored) { ::abort(); }'); 
R> crashMe(123)
Aborted (core dumped)
$ 

or you can use the inline package:

R> library(inline)
R> crashMe <- cfunction(body="::abort();")
R> crashMe()
Aborted (core dumped)
$ 

You can of course also do this outside of Rcpp or inline, but then you need to deal with the system-dependent ways of compiling, linking and loading.