Hello everybody thanks for the tips.
I *think* this should be the same thread.... The manpage for system() says that lines of over 8095 characters will be split. This is causing me problems. How do I get round the 8095 character limit? Simple toy example follows: jj <- system("echo 4 | awk '{for(i=1;i<100;i++){printf(\"%s,\", $1)}}'| sed -e \"s/,$//\"",intern=T) This is fine. But .. . . jj <- system("echo 4 | awk '{for(i=1;i<10000;i++){printf(\"%s,\", $1)}}'| sed -e \"s/,$//\"",intern=T) has "jj" split into three bits, which is upsetting my call. In my application the split occurs in the middle of a multi-digit number, which messes up my conversion to numeric? -- Robin Hankin Uncertainty Analyst National Oceanography Centre, Southampton European Way, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK tel 023-8059-7743 ______________________________________________ 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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.