[R] sending help output to a file

[Marc Schwartz]

On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 10:22 -0400, Leeds, Mark (IED) wrote:
> when i do ?whatever at the R prompt ( i use linux ), the help comes up
> but it comes up like a man page. i would prefer to send it to a file. i
> did a ?help and
> it says something about sending the output to a file but nothing
> specific enough that i can figure out what to do. the help page talks
> about a parameter called "type"
> but as far as i can tell, there is no "type" parameter in the call to
> the help function ? if someone could tell me how to send output to a
> file instead of the screen, i would
> really appreciate it. thanks.
>  
> also , i am using linux but i haven't figured out what kind or what
> version #.


Typically, R's help files are already available as text files. They are
usually in:

  $R_HOME/library/PACKAGENAME/help

where $R_HOME on Linux is usually:

> R.home()
[1] "/usr/local/lib/R"


Note that if you might prefer that help files come up in a browser
window (ie. Firefox), you can set:

options(htmlhelp=TRUE)

in your ~/.Rprofile. In this way, they won't come up in the pager within
the terminal console.  See ?options and section 10.8 in the Intro to R
Manual.



WRT to the Linux version, most recent versions support the LSB command
of:

$ lsb_release -a
LSB
Version:    :core-3.0-ia32:core-3.0-noarch:graphics-3.0-ia32:graphics-3.0-noarch
Distributor ID: FedoraCore
Description:    Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux)
Release:        5
Codename:       Bordeaux


You can also get kernel version information with:

$ uname -a
Linux horizons 2.6.17-1.2187_FC5 #1 Mon Sep 11 01:17:06 EDT 2006 i686
i686 i386 GNU/Linux


HTH,

Marc Schwartz