[R-SIG-Mac] Identifying computer from R

[Simon Urbanek]

Dennis,

PS1 is an internal shell environment variable (modifying prompt) which has nohting to do with R (and nothing to do with the computer name by default) so it won't be set in R, only in a shell.
If you want the machine's hostname you'd typically use system("hostname") in R.

Cheers,
Simon


> On 26/05/2023, at 17:15, Dennis Fisher <fisher using plessthan.com> wrote:
> 
> R 4.2.3
> OS X
> 
> Colleagues 
> 
> Interesting (minor) problem.  I have code that I run automatically on two different computers.  The code runs from Dropbox so there is not separate code for each computer.
> 
> In order to identify which computer is running the code, I was hoping to do something like:
> 	Sys.getenv(SOMETHING)
> 
> In a terminal window:
> 	echo $PS1
> returns the prompt on that particular computer.
> 
> However, when I attempt to access that from R, I am not successful.  For example:
> 
> In a terminal:
> 	echo $PS1
> returns:
> 	PET\!>
> 
> In R:
> 	Sys.getenv("PS1")
> returns:
> 	""
> 
> In R:
> 	system("echo $PS1") 
> returns an empty line.
> 
> A solution to this immediate problem (how to obtain that environment variable in R) or any other clever way to identify a particular computer would be much appreciated.
> 
> Dennis
> 
> 
> Dennis Fisher MD
> P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
> Phone / Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
> www.PLessThan.com
> 
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