[R] system/system2 command

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 8:07 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Jeff Breiwick <jeff.breiwick at noaa.gov>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> All,
>>>
>>> I had a simple function call I used to open up a dos shell running R
>>> under
>>> Win XP:
>>> system("cmd.exe", wait=FALSE, invisible=FALSE).
>>>
>>> This does not work with R 2.12.1 - I get a window that briefly flashes
>>> open
>>> but then disappears. Does anyone know the method to open a DOS command
>>> window in running R with Win XP? Thank you.
>>>
>>
>> This works on my Vista system:
>>
>> shell("start cmd")
>>
>>
>
> Is start back in Vista?  There was a start.exe in Windows95, but I think it
> disappeared in XP and I had to write my own. (Or maybe it became an internal
> command?) Brian Ripley added a similar program "open.exe" (based on the OSX
> name, I think) to R, so if "start cmd" fails, "open cmd" might succeed.
>

Yes its in Vista and its at least in XP Pro according to:
   http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/ntcmds.mspx

Note that its internal to cmd so if you are using some other command
line shell then you will need to do:
   cmd /c start

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