Revision of shell.exec?

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 I guess, we know how to make to work on a mac.

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<ligges at 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