[Rd] Wishlist: write R's bin path to the PATH variable and remove the version string in the installation dir under Windows

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I guess this issue must have been brought forward long time ago, but I
> still hope you can consider under Windows (during installation):
>
> 1. put R's bin path in the PATH variable of the system so that we can
> use the commands "R" and "Rscript" more easily;
>
> 2. remove the version string like R-2.13.0 in the default installation
> directory, e.g. only use a directory like C:/Program Files/R/ instead
> of C:/Program Files/R/R-2.13.0/; I know many people just follow the
> default setting when installing R, and this version string will often
> lead to many (unnecessary) copies of R in the system and brings
> difficulty to the first issue (several possible bin directories);
>
> I'm aware of some existing efforts in overcoming the difficulty of
> calling R under Windows like the R batch files project
> (http://code.google.com/p/batchfiles/), but I believe this is better
> to be solved in R directly.
>

Although I have some misgivings about this just to be sure we have all
based covered I have placed an R package called cmd in the batchfiles
download area (go to http://batchfiles.googlecode.com and click on
download tab).

Install the package and then every time you wish to use R.exe,
Rscript.exe, etc. start up R and run

library(cmd)
cmd32() # or cmd64()

and it will spawn a Windows console session with the appropriate path
variable set.

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