I'm trying to get started with R, on Ubuntu. I worked through the
tutorial, and have made a small tab-delimited subset of my data to try
out (10 cases with about a dozens variables). But I can't seem to figure
out how to actually refer to variables. I presume I'm missing something
very simple, but quite a while searching the doc and the FAQ haven't
helped me.

I'm loading the data with
    con <- read.table("tiny.txt", header=TRUE)

The first record is a set of variable names, tab-separated like the rest
of the rows. There are no row labels, thus the same number of
tab-delimited fields in the header record and the following records. The
read.table returns silently, and I can get a reasonable summary(con).
But if I try something like plot(rel,len), where rel and len are two of
the labels from the header row, I get

     Error in plot(rel, len) : object 'rel' not found

I've tried many variations (different variables, adding "con." on the
front, quoting, using field numbers instead of names, etc. I've also
read what I can find on read.table, but I'm clearly missing some basic
thing....

Can somebody put me back on the right track? Is there some additional
thing I have to do to make this into a "real" frame, or to bind
variables names to header names, or something like that?

Thanks, and sorry for being dense....

Steve




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