Best way to locate R executable from within R?
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Dan Tenenbaum <dtenenba at fhcrc.org> wrote:
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Hi,
I'd like to spawn of a new R process from within R using system(),
e.g. system("R -f myScript.R"). ?However, just specifying "R" as in
that example is not guaranteed to work, because "R" may not be on the
OS's search path.
?What is the best way, from within a running R, to infer the command
(basename or full path) for launching R in way that it works on any
OS? ?I came up with the following alternatives, but I'm not sure if
they'll work everywhere or not:
1. Rbin <- commandArgs()[1];
2. Rbin <- file.path(R.home(), "bin", "R");
Other suggestions that are better?
Rbin <- file.path(Sys.getenv("R_HOME"), "bin", "R")
I don't see how Sys.getenv("R_HOME") would be better than R.home() -
any reasons?
Your reply triggered me to read up on help("R.home"), where I noticed
the passage:
"A character string giving the R home directory or path to a
particular component. Normally the components are all subdirectories
of the R home directory, but this may not be the case in a Unix-like
installation. [...] The return value for "modules" and on Windows
"bin" is to a sub-architecture-specific location."
So, now I'd say that:
4. Rbin <- file.path(R.home("bin"), "R");
is better than (2). I'm still not sure whether to use (1) or (4), though.
/Henrik
Dan
/Henrik
______________________________________________ R-devel at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel