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 ... 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 >>>> >>>> ______________________________________________ >>>> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >>> ______________________________________________ >>> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >>> > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel