[R] installing ONLY the documentation files (Rd) for many packages?

[Kjetil Halvorsen]

see below.

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, Kjetil Halvorsen wrote:
>
>> I have been searching the documentation for some time nmow, but cannot
>> find it. It must be possible to download packages (many), but only install
>> the help system?
>
> I am not sure what you actally want: R CMD INSTALL does not install the Rd
> files -- it installs a database of parsed Rd files.
>
> All things are possible in a programming language, but you would need to
> study the R code of INSTALL to see what to extract.  One possibility would
> be to run a loop of calls to  R CMD Rdconv to install HTML versions of help
> (which some people have asked for in the past).
>
> However, disk space is cheap, and I would simply install the packages and
> discard the parts you don't want.
>
Thanks!  Finally, I am back to this, and below is my solution as a
shell script (bash,
debian):

# shell script to install all the packages in ~/R/allpackages,
# ( *.tar.gz files)
# to ~/R/allinstall
#
 for FILE in ~/R/allpackages/*z
 do
    if [ -f $FILE ]
    then
       nice R CMD INSTALL  --library=~/R/allinstall --no-test-load    \
              --no-configure --html --no-libs --no-exec  $FILE               \
                 || echo "Problems encountered during processing of $FILE" &
    fi
 done
#

However, this do not work! When I run the command within the loop
directly in a shell, I can see the results in ~/R/allinstall,
but run as above, I can see no results (apart from a lot of cpu cycles)

Kjetil


> --
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
>