[R] Where is gdata?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Spencer Graves
<spencer.graves at structuremonitoring.com> wrote:
> Hello, All:
>
>
>      Prof. Ripley suggested I remove RTools/perl from my path.  I did that
> leaving Strawberry perl.  Then everything seemed to work appropriately.
>

1. If you have the Rtools perl prior to any other perl on your path
then it does not use your path to find perl but rather it checks which
perl executable is associated with the .pl extension on your machine
and uses that.  Thus it should not be necessary to remove rtools from
your path if you have pl associated with perl.

2. If you have multiple versions of perl installed and you want
read.xls to use one which is not first on your path and you don't want
to change your system configuration you can use the perl= argument to
installXLSXsupport and to read.xls to specify the path to the perl.exe
that you do want to  use.

That being said its best not to have Rtools on your path, not only
because of its version of perl but also because it puts a find command
on your path which overrides Windows' own find command.  There is an
Rtools.bat command at http://batchtools.googlecode.com that will
temporarily put Rtools on your path in the current Windows console
session only so that you can normally keep it off your path and only
put it on your path in console sessions that need it.  You simply run
it without arguments, e.g.

Rtools
Rcmd build mypackage
etc.

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