[R] remote data I/O

[Giampiero Salvi]

Hi,
I wonder if it is possible to read data on another computer (unix like system)
using ssh (I mean any of ssh, scp, sftp). I saw that R has no problem reading
files across the net (for example read.table(url("http://www...")) ), but what
if the file is on a local disk of another machine? For security reasons we are
not allowed to have the normal ftp (and telnet) running.

I played a bit with url(file://), but I don't know how (if it's possible) to
specify both the address of the computer and the file name. I tried like this
url("file://host_name/path/filename") and url("file://host_name:/path/filename")
but it didn't work.

I want to do this because my data files are big (500Mb) and I don'r want to have
copies on every computer I use.

Thank you!
Giampiero