R_PROFILE on Windows
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Fernando Henrique Ferraz P. da Rosa wrote:
There seems to be a bug in the Startup section, regarding the R_PROFILE environment variable in Windows. If not a bug in the Startup itself, perhaps a bug in the documentation.
Nope, it works as documented, using exactly the same code as on Linux. You do not tell us your shell here (so I presume it is XP's cmd.exe), but you seem to have set R_PROFILE to a string enclosed in quotes (as the R output shows). Try RGui.exe R_PROFILE=C:/fernando/R.profile I am in the same boat, and so I use tcsh/sh on Windows to be sure I understand the quoting rules.
According to ?Startup:
Then R searches for the site-wide startup profile unless the
command line option '--no-site-file' was given. The name of this
file is taken from the value of the 'R_PROFILE' environment
variable. If this variable is unset, the default is
'$R_HOME/etc/Rprofile.site'
On Windows XP, I created a batch file with the following lines:
SET R_PROFILE="C:\fernando\R.profile"
"C:\progs\R-2.2.0\bin\Rgui.exe"
On c:\fernando\R.profile I had:
options(foo='bar')
Running the batch file I created I get, in R:
> options()$foo
NULL
>Sys.getenv("R_PROFILE")
R_PROFILE
"\"c:\\fernando\\R.profile\""
^^ ^^
I've tried using slashes instead of backslashes
(fernando/R.profile), double blackslashes (fernando\\R.profile) but it
seems there's no way to make it work.
The only way I could manage to have R read the profile was
renaming R.profile to .Rprofile and starting R on the directory the
.Rprofile was located.
Is this really the intended behaviour? If so, what's the
correct way to specify the R_PROFILE variable and have R use it on
Windows?
Ps: I've tested it on R 2.2.0 and on r-devel r36675, on Windows
XP SP2. Sorry if this is a non-bug. I'm a poor linux user trying to
survive on Windows, so I might have overloooked something.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at 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