Pink dots appear in files and unable to save files intermittently MacOS High Sierra

RStudio IDE
1

About 3-5 times per week I have files with weird pink dots at the end of the file and/or files that won't save. This never happens with the IDE on Windows 10.

Any idea how to fix this or why this is happening?

My web development IDEs haven't displayed this problem and they are on the same file system, if that helps.

Thanks

2

I am not sure what you mean. Is this something that's reprex-able? (I doubt it, but thought I'd ask).

Share a screen shot?

3

Thanks EconomiCurtis. I may be onto a solution.

Google Drive recently became Google Drive File Stream. I researched similar problems with Mac and MS Office products. Most of those didn't work, then I found an article on unacceptable path names for remote drives.

Well, GDFS is like a cloud drive with the possibility of locally saved "offline" files. So, I dug around and found this, https://support.google.com/a/answer/7644837?hl=en
I ran a system-wide rename of the mount as

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.google.drivefs.settings DefaultMountPoint '~/GDriveFS'

This seems to fix a problem with saving that I just noticed in Office (I had not been using it on my Mac until a week ago.) It seems to have fixed saving problems in Office, so I will update you in a week or so if I see no more pink dots.

I know that is a lot of detail, but this is likely hard to reprex. Maybe try Google Drive File Stream?

4

In terms of information that would be useful to figuring out the source of your issue,

  • I think it could be helpful to see what this pink-dot next to these files in the IDE looks like. Screenshot?
  • When you try to save and are prevented, could you show how you are trying to save these files.
  • What error or warning message do you receive? Reprex form would be awesome?
  • What steps have you taken already to resolve the issue (you kind of answered that already in the post above)
5

I don't have all the info you requested, but here is a screenshot from this morning.

Snip20180525_1

The x error from RStudio is:
unexpected token ''

This is a file that was on my Desktop, so no network drives were involved.

When I view the characters in terminal using a more command, here is how they appear:
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@

Running the code works with no errors caused by the pink dots. So, the problem is one of annoyance and confusion about the code having errors.