On Sep 14, 2011, at 4:15 PM, Brian Oney wrote:
> Hi there,
> new idea (at 10 at night). All the emails keep me thinking (btw thanks for
> all the feedback).
> What does this do on linux?
>
> getOption("pdfviewer")
> ### I got this idea from: getS3method("print","vignette")
>
It gives you the detected PDF viewer as I was explaining (essentially
R_PDFVIEWER). The two detected settings I was referring to are R_PDFVIEWER (for
PDF) and R_BROWSER (for URLs) which are the initial settings for the
"pdfviewer" and "browser" options.
Note that it's what it say it is - R_PDFVIEWER is usually something like
acroread or evince so not particularly useful for your purpose ...
Cheers,
Simon
> On windows, (an advantage...) somebody wrote a little program "open.exe" that
> comes stock with an R-installation, which somehow accesses the file system to
> find the default program to for a certain file type. I am guessing this
> little beauty is the engine of "shell.exec".
>
> (An honest) cheers,
> Brian
>
> On 9/14/2011 7:49 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>> On Sep 14, 2011, at 1:10 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Simon Urbanek
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> On Sep 14, 2011, at 11:08 AM, Brian Oney wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> 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, the problem is that "open" is unfortunately mapped to openvt on
>>>> Linux systems which is a quite obscure anachronism. But since Linux is
>>>> Linux there is no standard way to open a file, so it doesn't really matter
>>>> ;) -- xdg-utils come closest to what one may call standard but on many
>>>> systems they are not installed by default (in fact on none of the Linux
>>>> machines I have around). For URLs R does the hard work to try to figure
>>>> out what to do with them (it also does the same for PDFs), but you may end
>>>> up opening things in a browser although that's not what you had in mind.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Well I guess, we know how to make to work on a mac.
>>>>>
>>>> Yes, "open" works very well on Macs and is extremely useful (I use it all
>>>> the time - among other things you can use it with directories to browse
>>>> them...) - it is still beyond me why other unices don't bother ...
>>> Apple probably patented it.
>>>
>> I'm pretty sure it's at least as old as NeXT so that's way before the abuse
>> of software patents ;) - but who knows ...
>>
>> Cheers,
>> S
>>
>>
>>
>>> /Henrik
>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Simon
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> 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<[email protected]>:
>>>>>>> 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
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> [email protected] mailing list
>>>>>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>>>>> [email protected] mailing list
>>>>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>>>>
>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>>> [email protected] mailing list
>>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>> [email protected] mailing list
>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>
>>>
>
>
______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
