[R] newie help needed

[Peter Dalgaard]

Julie Harold <j.m.harold at uea.ac.uk> writes:

> hi,
> 
> I am a system admin who has just set up R-2.3.1 in suse 9.1 (opteron)
> for a previous windows user.  Please forgive any obvious stupid questions :)
> 
> We are struggling with a number of things.
> 
> 1.  is there a gui interface ?  How do we use it ?  R --gui just gets us
> to the command line.

Not really. The incantation is "R --gui=tk" or "gnome" or "X11"  but
the two former are quite sketchy (proof of concept, really). The last
one is the default, but not with menus etc., just windows for graphics.
 
> 2.  how do we do unix commands like cd ?

Any shell command can be executed via system(). This is in a subshell,
so of course cd has no effect on return: look up setwd()

> 3.  can we define default directories - eg for data files ?

Not in any "standard" way AFAIK. There is a number of ways you could
create your own convention (e.g. via environment variables), though.

> 4.  we want to use this mainly in batch mode once we get our act
> together - are there any good examples of batch scripts we can use as
> crib sheets.

Depends on what you want to do. There are quite a few documents around
with example code and several books have their scripts made public.

> 5.  I installed some packages earlier - but now I am obviously doing
> something wrong
> > install.packages(gnomeGui)
> Error in install.packages(gnomeGui) : object "gnomeGui" not found

Quotes needed.

In general, do your self a favour and read at least the Intro and
Admin manuals from.

http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
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