[R-SIG-Mac]Newbie Question

[Stefano Iacus]

On Venerd́, feb 28, 2003, at 05:29 Europe/Rome, Rick Osborne wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I recently installed R on my new PowerBook G4 moving from the Windows
> world. In that world, I was a fairly competent user. However there are 
> two
> things about the Mac implementation that I can not figure out. Stefano 
> has
> already tried to answer one of my questions. However, it did not work 
> or I
> did not understand. Here are the questions:
>
> 1) When I try to change the directory and read in data using the
> load("filename.Rda") command, I keep getting the following error 
> message:
>
>> load("filename.Rda")
>
> Error: bad restore file magic number (file may be corrupted)-- no data
> loaded.

Rick, try to read the help files. If it is a simple txt file, then you 
should use read.table instead.
There are a couple of good intros written by R-core members like:
* An introduction to R
* R Data Import/Export
you can find both inside the doc folder of you installation of R or 
(better) on the www.r-project.org site in the "Manuals" section

>
> All this is is a simple text file. I have tried changing the directory
> every which way, changing the extension etc but I can not read data in 
> and
> I keep getting that error message.
>
> What do I need to do? This is very frustrating for such a simple
> operation.
>
> 2) The next question is how does one install a package that is not on 
> the
> CRAN website? I downloaded the Simple package but do not know how to 
> get
> it working. Dragging it in to the R folder does not seem to do it.
>
If packages does not contain C/Fortran code, then you can use any 
prebuilt version of it (either Windows or Unix)
You cannot use packages as they are beacusa they need to be built.
If you want to build packages on your own, have a look inside the R 
sources in the file INSTALL of the src/macintosh directory.


> Thanks very much and thanks for the port to Mac OS X.
>

The "true" MacOSX version of R is the Darwin/R and not the Carbon one 
you are using. The Carbon version of R will be soon abandoned and fully 
replaced by the Darwin one.

stefano


> Rick Osborne
>
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