[R] Installing packages from command line on Linux RHEL4

[Adaikalavan Ramasamy]

Assuming the R packages have been downloaded locally and end with 
tar.gz, then how about simply changing to where the files are located 
and typing the following command?

  ls *.tar.gz | while read x; do echo "R CMD INSTALL $x"; done | bash


Alternatively, you can use the install.packages() function in R.

Regards, Adai




Kermit Short wrote:
> Dirk-
> 	Many thanks for your reply.  As I mentioned, I know very little
> about programming in 'R' and what I've got is a BASH script.  If needs be,
> I'll look up how to read in a text file through R and add that into your
> script in lieu of the (argv) stuff, but you wouldn't happen to know how to
> accomplish the same thing using the 
> 
> R CMD INSTALL
> 
> Shell command?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -Kermit
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dirk Eddelbuettel [mailto:edd at debian.org] 
> Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 12:00 PM
> To: k_short at lanl.gov
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Installing packages from command line on Linux RHEL4
> 
> 
> Hi Kernit,
> 
> On 21 May 2007 at 11:37, Kermit Short wrote:
> | Greetings.
> | 
> |    I am a System Administrator, and thus have very little knowledge of R
> | itself.  I have been asked to install a list of some 200 packages (from
> | CRAM) to R.  Rather than installing each package manually, I was hoping I
> | could script this.  I've written a BASH script that hopefully will do
> this,
> | but I'm wondering about the Mirror Selection portion of the installation
> | process.  I've looked and can't find anywhere a parameter to supply that
> | specifies a mirror to use so that I don't have to manually select it for
> | each package I want to install.  In this case, with nearly 200 packages to
> | install, this could become quite tedious.  Does anyone have any
> | suggestions?
> 
> The narrow answer is try adding 
> 
> 	repos="http://cran.us.r-project.org"    
> 
> Also, and if I may, the littler front-end (essentially "#!" shebang support
> for R)
> helps there:
> 
> basebud:~> cat bin/installPackages.r
> #!/usr/bin/env r
> #
> # a simple example to install all the listed arguments as packages
> 
> if (is.null(argv)) {
>   cat("Usage: installPackages.r pkg1 [pkg2 [pkg3 [...]]]\n")
>   q()
> }
> 
> for (pkg in argv) {
>   install.packages(pkg, lib="/usr/local/lib/R/site-library", depend=TRUE)
> }
> 
> You would still need to add repos="..." there. I tend to do that in my
> ~/.Rprofile.
> 
> Hth, Dirk
>