Thanks, Duncan, for the pointer in the right direction. I didn't realize cmd's treatment of quotes was so odd. For the curious, the quote behavior of cmd (under XP) is here, in the Remarks under Processing quotation marks:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/cmd.mspx?mfr=true In my case I can use system. The only workaround I could think of for executing a command that requires a shell (e.g., using redirection) is to create a temporary batch file and cmd that, which is a bit ugly. Again, thanks for all the input. Oliver On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Duncan Murdoch <[email protected]> wrote: > On 07/09/2010 5:01 PM, Oliver Soong wrote: >> >> Can somebody confirm some unexpected behavior? This is under Windows, >> with R 2.11.0 and 2.11.1. >> >> 1. Create a trivial test file (I called it test.R) containing: >> cat("Success.\n") >> 2. Load R (Gui or Term) and run: >> shell("\"C:\\path\\to\\Rscript.exe\" \"C:\\path\\to\\test.R\"") >> >> In my case, I get various error messages. If the >> path\\to\\Rscript.exe has spaces or not, it complains that the first >> token (e.g., 'C:\Program') is not a valid command. If the >> path\\to\\Rscript.exe has no spaces, it complains that the specified >> path is invalid. If C:\\path\\to\\test.R has no spaces, and I remove >> the surrounding quotes, things work as expected. >> >> I think this might be related to some earlier e-mail traffic that I >> didn't see a satisfactory resolution to. > > That message is coming from Windows, not from R. R is trying to execute > > cmd /c "c:\path\to\Rscript.exe" "c:\path\to\test.R" > > and that doesn't work. You'll have to ask Microsoft why, but I believe the > correct syntax is > > cmd /c "c:\path\to\Rscript.exe c:\path\to\test.R" > > i.e. /c is followed by just one quoted string, not two. If you need extra > quotes because of spaces in the path to Rscript, I don't know what you can > do. > > I'd recommend using system() instead of shell(); it will call Rscript > directly, not go through the cmd shell. > > Duncan Murdoch > >> >> Cheers, >> Oliver >> >> ______________________________________________ >> [email protected] mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >> PLEASE do read the posting guide >> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > > -- Oliver Soong Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5131 805-893-7044 (office) 610-291-9706 (cell) ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
