Every now and then I have to run a function that takes a lot of time and I need to interrupt the processing before it\'s complete. To do so, I click on the red sign of "
Unfortunately, RStudio is currently not able to interrupt R in a couple situations:
R is executing an external program (e.g. you cannot interrupt system("sleep 10")
),
R is executing (for example) a C / C++ library call that doesn't provide R an opportunity to check for interrupts.
In such a case, the only option is to forcefully kill the R process -- hopefully this is something that could change in a future iteration of RStudio.
EDIT: RStudio v1.2 should now better handle interrupts in many of these contexts.