Thank you for your comments. After further investigation and off-line correspondence with Duncan Murdoch, I found that the principal problem was a bad unzip from cygwin. It was leaving the .exe files with permission 666 instead of the correct 777. I changed unzip programs and everything now works inside the cygwin *shell* buffer inside emacs.
There was a secondary problem that the environment variables inside the emacs buffer running cygwin needed adjustment. These three changes are needed inside the bash running inside emacs to make the command Rcmd check packagename work: PATH=.:/cygdrive/c/progra~1/R/tools/bin:/cygdrive/c/MinGW/bin:/cygdrive/c/Perl/bin:/cygdrive/c/texm f/miktex/bin:/cygdrive/c/progra~1/R/R- 2.3.0/bin:/cygdrive/c/progra~1/htmlhe~1:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/cygdrive/c/gs/gs8.00/bin:/cygdrive /c/gs/gs8.00/lib:/cygdrive/c/windows:/cygdrive/c/windows/system32 R_HOME=c:/progra~1/R/R-2.3.0 COMSPEC=c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe ##this is necessary and in DOS notation In order to make C-c C-p (equivalently, clicking preview) work on .Rd files, I needed the following emacs statements (setenv "PATH" ".;c:\\progra~1 \\R\\tools\\bin;c:\\MinGW\\bin;c:\\Perl\\bin;c:\\texmf\\miktex\\bin;c:\\progra~1\\R\\R-2.3.0 \\bin;c:\\progra~1\\htmlhe~1;c:\\gs\\gs8.00\\bin;c:\\gs\\gs8.00 \\lib;c:\\windows;c:\\windows\\system32") (setenv "R_HOME" "c:\progra~1\R\R-2.3.0") (setenv "COMSPEC" "c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe") My mailer folds lines at about 100 characters. Receiving mail programs might fold them again. Each of those PATH statements is a single line. Please unfold them before using them. Rich ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
