As far as I can see, R's system, shell etc. functions either call/launch functionality in the core operating system (COMMAND.COM) or free standing exes.

Win32 APIs are buried inside operating system synamic link libraries (DLLs) and can be called by other languages. An example is:


Function PathFileExists Lib "shlwapi.dll" 
Alias "PathFileExistsA" (ByVal pszPath As String) As Long

Here, the API is PathFileExists, which is found in SHWAPI.DLL; it requires a characer argument that is either the name of a file or directory and returns TRUE if it exists or FALSE if it doesn't. 

A number of these APIs are available in R builtin functions but there are others that aren't. I asked the question because if there is a way in R to call these APIs. a great deal of time can be saved.
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