Thanks everyone for the help.
I should have said that I want to do this generally, not as a one-off.
So I want a function to do it. Like this
tp<-function(x, nr, nc)
{
matrix( c(x,rep(0, nr-length(x)+1)), nrow=nr, ncol=nc)
}
tp(x=c(1,2), nr=5, nc=4)
This one looks good -- the warning message is annoying though...
Bill