[R] Installing R-packages in Windows

[Mike Marchywka]

( hotmail just randomly decides not to prefix original text, my comments below) 


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Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:36:11 +0100
From: erikl at phonetik.uni-muenchen.de
To: r-help at r-project.org



Hi there,
I have the following problem and I hope somebody might help me.

First of all: I am using WinXP SP3 (english and/or german) with R in
Version 2.10.0.

Now I am trying to install some packages but unfortunately I am getting
a weird error. No matter which package I am trying to install - I nearly
get the same error.

It looks like this:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
C:\Program Files\R\R-2.10.0\bin>R CMD INSTALL
%SystemDrive%\rPAcsTemp\car_2.0-2.
zip
Warning in rawToChar(block[seq_len(ns)]) :
   truncating string with embedded nul:

MEEEE::::::


I used to build all from source then that stopped working and I have
seen others here complain about installation failures. I have had  good
luck with what others have suggested, and use install.packages()

It goes into a script ok, for example, ( note that "myR" is my 
script that invokes R but you can change etc). This points to ucla
mirror, writes a script into $tf to install $pkf,  installs $pkf by
running the gerated script, and then shows you the results and deletes junk
( normally you want to check error codes before deling "junk" however) 

tf="$$_temp"
cat - << DUMMTY  > $tf
options(repos=c("http://cran.stat.ucla.edu"))
install.packages(c("$pkf"),dep=TRUE)
DUMMTY
echo executing
cat "$tf"
myR -run "$tf"

echo removing $tf
rm "$tf"
echo removing R output
cat "$tf".Rout
rm "$tf".Rout