[R] system() or pipe(..., open = "r") without child process?

[Benjamin Tyner]

Greetings

On linux, is it possible to invoke an OS command from within R without 
spawning a child process? If not, is it possible to avoid copying the 
"parts of the caller's context" that are mentioned on the clone manpage?

  ENOMEM Cannot  allocate  sufficient memory to allocate a task structure
               for the child, or to copy those parts of  the caller's  
context
               that need to be copied.

(I am trying to avoid that ENOMEM condition when calling system(), 
pipe(), etc).

Regards,

Ben