When trying to launch R from terminal (powershell or git bash on win10), one of my students is simply returned to their prompt instead of being launched into the interactive R prompt. Interestingly, when they try to launch cmd from powershell, they run into the same error, does R depend on cmd working and there is a deeper problem to why this fails, or do you think it is R specific? When they try to install from github with devtools, they get the error system command 'Rcmd.exe' failed, exit status: 1, stdout + stderr empty.
A similar question was asked here without response. We tried disabling file sync and security services but to no avail.
I understand that other students that run the same commands have no problem?
What is the exact command the student is trying to execute?
Does the particular student has a username that is special in the sense of containing non-ascii characters or (white) spaces?
Thanks for the reply @HanOostdijk ! Simply running R from powershell or git bash results in no output. Trying to install any package from github via devtools (e.g. devtools::install_github("ucbds-infra/ottr@stable")) results in the error I reported. This problem only affected one students and they do not have a username that contains non-ascii characters. After resetting their windows installation R now works, but it was a rather extreme measure, so I would still be interested to know the root cause of this for the future.