[Rd] Revision of shell.exec?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11-09-15 4:27 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>
>
> On 14.09.2011 22:15, 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")
>>
>> 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".
>
> No. It simply uses ShellExecute() in windows.h, i.e. defined in
> Microsoft's Windows User Interface.´:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb762153%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Yes, and open.exe is a simple command line wrapper for that call.

Duncan Murdoch


>
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
>>
>> (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
>>>> <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>  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<ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>:
>>>>>>>> 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
>>>>>>>>>
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