[Rd] R 3.0, Rtools3.0,l Windows7 64-bit, and permission agony

[Kevin Coombes]

On 4/20/2013 12:54 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 13-04-20 12:30 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Duncan Murdoch
>> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 13-04-20 11:09 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Just curious:  how often do you use the Windows find command?  
>>>>>>> We have
>>>>>>> put
>>>>>>> instructions in place for people to run the install process with a
>>>>>>> renamed
>>>>>>> Rtools find command (which I think is the only conflict). The 
>>>>>>> issue is
>>>>>>> that
>>>>>>> more users who want to use the command line commands are 
>>>>>>> familiar with
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> Unix variant (which came first, by the way) than the Windows 
>>>>>>> one, so
>>>>>>> renaming the Rtools one would cause trouble for more people.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Its not just find - its also sort. And really R has no business
>>>>>> clobbering built in Windows commands. This is just wrong and really
>>>>>> causes anyone who does any significant amount of Windows batch
>>>>>> programming (or uses batch programs of any complexity) endless
>>>>>> problems.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Which is presumably why Rtools doesn't modify the path by default.
>>>>>
>>>>> Better solutions (e.g. Rstudio and devtools) temporarily set the path
>>>>> on when you're calling R CMD *.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I am well aware of the various kludges to address this including my
>>>> own batchfiles ( http://batchfiles.googlecode.com ) which handles this
>>>> by temporarily changing the path as well; however, the real problem is
>>>> that Rtools does not play nice with Windows and that needs to be
>>>> addressed directly.
>>>
>>>
>>> It has been.  You ignored it.
>>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>
>> If some change to address this has been made that would be great but
>> there is no mention of it on the Rtools page in the change history
>> section (the only documented change relates to the png/tiff/jpeg
>> libraries), there was no announcement that I saw and Rtools\bin still
>> contains find and sort so what specifically is the change?
>
> It's not a change to Rtools, it's a change is to the build system in 
> R:  it allows you to rename sort or find in your own copy of Rtools, 
> and R will use whatever you specify.  You were informed of this when I 
> did it in 2007, and I've mentioned it when the topic comes up here, 
> most recently in the message quoted above.  That's a long time ago, so 
> I don't remember if you tried it then, but I've never heard a 
> complaint from anyone else that it doesn't work.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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How do you do that?  (More explicitly, what steps would I have to take 
to redefine things like find.exe and sort.exe in Rtools so that R would 
know how to find them and use them? I can't figure that out from the 
earlier parts of these messages.)