On Thu, 26 Feb 2009, Paul Gilbert wrote:
Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
....
Try
if (.Platform$OS.type == "windows") ... else ...
Gabor has suggested what I think is the best way to do this check, but in my
experience, if you are doing this check then you are almost certainly missing
some feature of R that will let you avoid doing it.
For graphs, dev.new() has been mentioned. I would be curious to know when
people find it necessary to do this check, other than to issue a system()
command for some very specialized local system reason (i.e. something that
would never be used in a package and rarely in code run on different
computers - not just different OSs).
Grep-ing the R and package sources is informative.
One place that such a test is needed is for system/shell differences,
and the fact that some Windows commands need \ as the file separator
(and some need / or shell-specific quoting). Quite a few packages are
calling e.g. gs (where the name is platform-dependent).
Some packages seem to treat tk differently by platform, but that seems
to me to be largely a legacy of Tk 8.4: 8.5 is more portable.
But many uses in packages are no longer necessary, e.g. flush.console
exists everywhere, and R 2.9.0 will have an unzip() function.
--
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)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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