[R] system() function

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You don't want shQuote - that makes it a single argument.

Shells strip quotes, but system() does not use a shell on Windows -- you 
could use shell() not system(), but that would be overkill here.

On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Jeff Breiwick wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am trying to run the command: R CMD INSTALL -l mypath mypackagename
> from within R (Windows XP) using system() and get the following error:
>
> ARGUMENT 'CMD INSTALL -l D:/R/JMB.LIBS jmb.test' __ignored__
>
> Fatal error: you must specify '--save', '--no-save' or '--vanilla'
>
> My function contains these 3 lines:
>  setwd("D:/R/R.pkgs") # path to files set using package.skeleton()
>  commands <- shQuote("CMD INSTALL -l D:/R/JMB.LIBS jmb.test")
>  system(paste('"R"',commands))
>
> Can anyone tell me where I have gone astray? I suspect the problem lies in
> quoting the strings. The command (R CMD INSTALL etc.) runs OK if I run it in
> a windows shell.
> Thank you.
>
> Jeff Breiwick
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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