On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urba...@r-project.org> 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 ...
Apple probably patented it. /Henrik > > 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 > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel