What does “not run” mean in R help pages?

Question

Sometimes on an R help page the phrase \"not run\" appears in comments. Check out this from the help page for \"with()\":

Examples
require(stats); require(gr         


        

Answer 1

The canonical example here might be in the help page for rm:

## Not run: 
## remove (almost) everything in the working environment.
## You will get no warning, so don't do this unless you are really sure.
rm(list = ls())

## End(Not run)

If this ran it would of course have undesired effects.