How to cancel an Infinite Loop in R

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Level 1

4 points

How to cancel an Infinite Loop in R

I'm trying to get some code running in R on my MacBook Pro, and I made the mistake of writing an infinite loop. Normally, I'd just hit "esc" in order to terminate the running program. How do I cancel the infinite loop?

Posted on Nov 14, 2018 5:47 AM

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Answer 1

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BDAqua

Level 10

239,009 points

Nov 14, 2018 9:18 AM in response to orok275

In
```
RStudio
```
,
```
Esc
```
works, on windows, Mac, and ubuntu (and I would guess on other linux distributions as well).
If the process is ran in say ubuntu shell (and this is not
```
R
```
specific), for example using:
```
Rscript my_file.R
```
```
Ctrl + c
```
kills the process
```
Ctrl + z
```
suspends the process
Within R shell,
```
Ctrl + C
```
kills helps you escape it

Control-C works, although depending on what the process is doing it might not take right away.

If you're on a unix based system, one thing I do is control-z to go back to the command line prompt and then issue a 'kill' to the process ID.

Try out Ctrl + z But it will kill the process, not suspend it.

You should be able to run kill in terminal:

$ kill -2 pid

You can find the pid by running

$ps aux | grep exec/R

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