[R] Invoking shell commands from within R

[Ross Ihaka]

On 26 Apr 1999, Fredrik Glockner wrote:

> In S-Plus, one can invoke a shell command by prepending it with a "!",
> e.g.:
> 
>     > !ls
> 
> Is something similar available in R?  Is it possible to execute shell
> commands from within R?

The code to support this is present in main.c.  To compile this in,
place the line

	#define SHELL_ESCAPE

at the top of src/main/main.c.

Using "!" in this way is syntactically ugly and it was a general decision
to not make this a standard R feature (but I left the code in because I
"knew" someone would ask ...).

	Ross

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