[Rd] R CMD install: problem quoting spaces when calling gzip?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You haven't told us your version of R (nor any of the other 
information requested in the posting guide).  As far as I can see this 
works in 2.11.0 alpha.

On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, jochen laubrock wrote:

> There appears to be a quoting problem in the way R CMD install handles file names containing spaces, more specifically, in the way the argument is passed through to gzip.
>
> The install.packages command
>
> (from R)
> install.packages("~/Projects/R library/bar/eyetrackR_0.13.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type = "source")
>
> expands to
>
> system("R_LIBS='/Users/foo/Library/R/2.10/library' "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/R CMD INSTALL -l '/Users/foo/Library/R/2.10/library'   '/Users/foo/Projects/R\ library/bar/eyetrackR_0.13.tar.gz'")

So that is fine.

>
> and gives the same error messages as the following commands from Terminal.app on Mac OS X
>
> (from bash)
> R CMD install /Users/foo/Projects/R\ library/bar/eyetrackR_0.13.tar.gz
> R CMD install "~/Projects/R library/bar/eyetrackR_0.13.tar.gz"
> R CMD install '~/Projects/R library/bar/eyetrackR_0.13.tar.gz'

the documented command is INSTALL.

> , namely (the error messages):
>
> gzip: /Users/foo/Projects/R.gz: No such file or directory
> gzip: library/bar/eyetrackR_0.13.tar.gz: No such file or directory

Yes, and INSTALL is not designed to work with paths with spaces in on 
Unix-alikes.

>
> The following commands do work
>
> (from R)
> setwd("~/Projects/R library/bar/")
> install.packages("eyetrackR_0.13.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type = "source")
>
> (from bash)
> cd ~/Projects/R\ library/bar/
> R CMD install eyetrackR_0.13.tar.gz
>
> Interestingly, if the file is unpacked on the command line (tar xzvf), then both R CMD install and install.packages work fine using the quoted path name syntax, i.e.,
>
> R CMD install /Users/foo/Projects/R\ library/bar/eyetrackR
> install.packages("~/Projects/R library/bar/eyetrackR", repos = NULL, type = "source")
>
> Is this a known problem?

It is a known restriction.

> I searched the archives, but did not find a decisive answer (only 
some rather old posts suggesting not to use path names containing spaces--unfortunately this is not an option in the managed Windows environment I need to work in next week).
>
> Sorry for the long post and thanks for your time,
> Jochen
>
> ----
> Jochen Laubrock, Dept. of Psychology, University of Potsdam,
> Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
> phone: +49-331-977-2346, fax: +49-331-977-2793
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
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