[R] Curious warning in R for OS X w/Xwindows

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

"Bear F. Braumoeller" <bbraumoeller at wcfia.harvard.edu> writes:

> I recently reformatted my TiBook and reinstalled everything from the
> system up.  After installing Apple's version of XWindows and the
> XWindows version of R 1.7.0, I ran the two and got a strange warning:
> 
> -----
> R : Copyright 2003, The R Development Core Team
> Version 1.7.0 Patched (2003-05-14)
> 
> R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
> You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
> Type `license()' or `licence()' for distribution details.
> 
> R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
> Type `contributors()' for more information.
> 
> Type `demo()' for some demos, `help()' for on-line help, or
> `help.start()' for a HTML browser interface to help.
> Type `q()' to quit R.
> 
>  > help("lm")
> WARNING: terminal is not fully functional
> -  (press RETURN)
> -----
> 
> The main functional disabilities I've noticed after I press return are
> more or less cosmetic -- the arrow keys don't scroll, for example;
> rather, they produce ugly characters on the screen -- but are
> nevertheless annoying.  Moreover, I don't get this message in a
> regular terminal window when I use the "man" command; there, the
> viewer works exactly as it should.
> 
> Has anyone else encountered this, and does anyone have a fix?

OS X is not quite Unix/Linux, so I don't really know, but I'd suspect
that somehow the environment variable that describes the terminal
capabilities (usually called TERM) got unset or not set properly for
the terminal emulator in which you are running R. How exactly are you
starting R? What is the output of 

Sys.getenv("TERM")
Sys.getenv("PAGER")
options("pager")

?
-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907