On Wed, 14 Sep 2011, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Sep 14, 2011, at 11:08 AM, Brian Oney wrote:
Hi Steve,
a quick look at "browseURL" will tell you that indeed "system" or "shell.exec"
(on a windows platform) is used to open up a URL.
The "open " part of the proposed function was written to work on a Mac. Because Mac is a
unix platform, I assumed that the function "open" would be omnipresent on unix platforms,
my mistake.
Well, the problem is that "open" is unfortunately mapped to openvt on Linux
systems which is a quite obscure anachronism. But since Linux is Linux there is no
standard way to open a file, so it doesn't really matter ;) -- xdg-utils come closest to
what one may call standard but on many systems they are not installed by default (in fact
on none of the Linux machines I have around). For URLs R does the hard work to try to
figure out what to do with them (it also does the same for PDFs), but you may end up
opening things in a browser although that's not what you had in mind.
Well I guess, we know how to make to work on a mac.
Yes, "open" works very well on Macs and is extremely useful (I use
it all the time - among other things you can use it with directories
to browse them...) - it is still beyond me why other unices don't
bother ...
They do: as 'open' is already taken, they use xdg-open.
I am not at all convinced base R needs any such addition: we manage to
open anything R itself needs with the existing code.
Cheers,
Simon
I will make the transition to Linux and get back to this in a while, ok?
Cheers,
Brian
On 9/14/2011 2:50 PM, Stephen Weston wrote:
2011/9/14 Uwe Ligges<lig...@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>:
On 14.09.2011 12:27, Brian Oney wrote:
Hi List,
I hope this is correct list to propose function extensions, sorry if not.
I am preparing for a (hopefully painless) migration to linux. As far as
I am aware of, the function "shell.exec" only comes with the windows
version. I think this is a handy little function and would like to see
my scripts work when I migrate.
May I propose something (like the following)?
open.file<- function(file) {
if(.Platform$OS.type=="windows") {shell.exec(file)} else
{system(paste("open ",file))}
}
Or just a small addition to the shell.exec function and no new named
function.
Hope the idea isn't received as "too stupid".
What is "open" supposed to do on a non-Windows machine? I do not have it on
the only Linux installation I looked at now, hence we obviously cannot
assume it exists on an arbitrary installation.
I think the nearest equivalent for those running Gnome or KDE may be
"xdg-open". So there would probably need to be a new option for specifying
the appropriate command.
Personally, I am more inclined to use "system" for executing commands,
and "browseURL" for opening documents. "browseURL" even uses
"xdg-open" in my R installation on my Linux machine.
- Steve
Best,
Uwe Ligges
Cheers,
Brian
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--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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