R
BATCH?rw1063\library directory.update.packages() failsThis FAQ is for the Windows port of R: it describes features
specific to that version. The main R FAQ can be found at
http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html.
The information here applies only to recent versions of R for
Windows, (1.4.0 or later); the current version is
often called something like rw1063 (although not
officially).
Go to any CRAN site (see http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
for a list), navigate to the bin/windows/base
directory and collect the files you need. There are two versions of
the distribution.
1) rw1063.exe is about 19Mb and gives a complete
installation.
2) Directory miniR contains miniR.exe
and eight files miniR-?.bin. You can put
miniR.exe and miniR-1.bin on one floppy
and the remaining miniR-?.bin on a floppy each. This
is a small installation, containing the text and compiled HTML
versions of the help files and the An Introduction to R
and Data Import/Export manuals in PDF.
First, you need Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP: Windows 3.11+win32s will not work. Your file system must allow long file names (as is likely except perhaps for some network-mounted systems).
If you want to build packages from sources, we recommend that you choose an installation path not containing spaces. (Using a path with spaces in will probably work, but is little-tested.)
To use rw1063.exe or miniR.exe. Just
double-click on the icon and follow the instructions. If you
installed R this way you can uninstall it from the Control Panel or
Start Menu (unless you supressed making a group for R).
Choose a working directory for R. If you installed manually,
make a shortcut to rw1063\bin\Rgui.exe on your desktop
or somewhere on the Start menu file tree. Right-click the shortcut,
select Properties... and change the `Start in' field to your
working directory.
You may also want to add command-line arguments at the end of
the Target field, for example --sdi
--max-mem-size=40M. You can also set environment variables
at the end of the Target field, for example
R_LIBS=p:/myRlib.
Just double-click on the shortcut you prepared at installation.
If you want to set up another project, make a new shortcut or use the existing one and change the `Start in' field of the Properties.
You may if you prefer run R from the command line of any shell
you use, for example an `MS-DOS window' (Windows 9x/ME), a `Command
Prompt' (Windows 2000/XP) or a port of a Unix shell such as
tcsh or bash. (The command line can be
anything you would put in the Target field of a shortcut, and the
starting directory will be the currect working directory of the
shell.)
Normally you can do this from the R group on the Start Menu or
from the Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel. If
it does not appear there or if you want to remove an old version,
run unins000.exe in the top-level installation
directory. (As from version 1.6.2 there will be a separate
uninstall item in the R group for each installed version of R.)
Uninstalling R only removes files from the initial installation, not for example packages you have installed.
If all else fails, you can just delete the whole directory in which R was installed.
That's a matter of taste. For most people the best thing to do
is to uninstall R (see the previous Q), install the new version,
copy any installed packages to the library folder in the new
installation, run update.packages() (from the menu, if
you prefer) and then delete anything left of the old installation.
Different versions of R are quite deliberately installed in
parallel folders so you can keep old versions around if you prefer.
Indeed there is. It is set by the command-line flag
--max-mem-size (see How do I install R
for Windows?) and defaults to the smaller of the amount of
physical RAM in the machine and 1Gb. It can be set to any amount
over 10M. (R will not run in less.) Be aware though that Windows
has (in most versions) a maximum amount of user virtual memory of
2Gb, and parts of this can be reserved by processes but not used.
Because of the way the memory manager works, it is possible that
there will be free memory but R will not be able to make use of
it.
Use ?Memory and ?memory.size for
information about memory usage. The limit can be raised by calling
memory.limit within a running R session.
We have found that starting R with too large a value of
--max-mem-size may fail: the limit seemed to be about
1.7Gb on Windows 2000 Professional.
R can be compiled to use a different memory manager which might be better at using large amounts of memory, but is substantially slower (making R several times slower on some tasks).
Create a separate shortcut for each project: see Q2.3. All the paths to files used by R are relative to the starting directory, so setting the `Start in' field automatically helps separate projects.
Alternatively, start R by double-clicking on a saved
.RData file in the directory for the project you want
to use, or drag-and-drop a file with extension .RData
onto an R shortcut. In either case, the working directory will be
set to that containing the file.
It depends what you want to print.
dev.print with suitable arguments (see its help page:
most likely dev.print(win.graph) will work).File |
Print. (This will print the selection if there is one,
otherwise the whole console or pager contents.)RHOME\bin\helpPRINT.bat and
have LaTeX installed you can print help files by
help(fn_name, offline=TRUE).R BATCH?Yes, if you have Perl and the files for making source packages
(from rw1063.exe) installed. The Windows analogue is
Rcmd BATCH: use Rcmd BATCH --help for
full details.
Otherwise you can set up a batch file using
Rterm.exe. A sample batch file might contain (as one
line)
path_to_R\bin\Rterm.exe --no-restore --no-save < %1 > %1.out
Yes. Recent versions of ESS (e.g. 5.1.20) come with support for
this version of R, and there is support for interrupting the R
process from ESS (by C-c C-c).
For help with ESS, please send email to ESS-help@stat.ethz.ch, not the R mailing lists.
Several places in the documentation use these terms.
The working directory is the directory from which
Rgui or Rterm was launched, unless a
shortcut was used when it is given by the `Start in' field of the
shortcut's properties. You can find this from R code by the call
getwd().
The home directory is set as follows:
If environment variable R_USER is set, its value is
used.
Otherwise if environment variable HOME is set, its
value is used.
Otherwise if environment variables HOMEDRIVE and
HOMEPATH are set, the value is
${HOMEDRIVE}${HOMEPATH}.
If all of these fail, the current working directory is used.
You can find this from R code by
Sys.getenv("R_USER").
Environment variables can be set in R in three different ways.
RGui you could havepath_to_R\bin\Rgui.exe HOME=p:/ R_LIBS=p:/myRlib
.Renviron in the working
directory or your home directory, for example containing the
lineR_LIBS=p:/myRlib
See ?Startup for more details of environment
files.
autoexec.bat or in an MS-DOS window from which you
launch Rgui / Rterm. Under Windows
NT/2000/XP you can use the control panel or the properties of `My
Computer'. Under Windows ME you can use the System Configuration
Utility (under Programs, Accessories, System Tools on the Start
menu). You may have to log out or reboot for such changes to take
effect.The order of precedence for environmental variables is the order
in which these options are listed, that is the command line then
.Renviron then the inherited environment.
How did you specify it? Backslashes have to be doubled in R
character strings, so for example one needs
"d:\\rw1063\\library\\xgobi\\scripts\\xgobi.bat". Make
life easier for yourself by using forward slashes as path
separators: they do work under Windows.
Another possible source of grief is spaces in folder names. We
have tried to make R work on paths with spaces in, but lots of
people writing packages for Unix do not bother. So it is worth
trying the alternative short name (something like
PROGRA~1; you can get it as the `MS-DOS name' from the
Properties of the file on most versions of Windows, and from
dir /X in a Command Prompt window on
2000/XP).
Not itself.
The installers set some entries to allow uninstallation. In
addition they set a Registry key
LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\R-core\R giving the version and
install path. Again, this is not used by R itself, but it will be
used by the DCOM interface (http://cran.r-project.org/other-software.html).
Finally, a file association for extension .RData is
set in the Registry.
You can add the Registry entries by running
RSetReg.exe in the bin folder, and remove
them by running this with argument /U. Note that the
settings are all per machine and not per user, and that this
neither sets up nor removes the file associations.
This used to happen occasionally, and all the occurrences we
have solved have been traced to faulty versions of
msvcrt.dll. We have installed a workaround as from
rw1051 that seems to avoid this.
If it still happens, try extracting the one to be found in the
self-extracting archive ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/softlib/mslfiles/msvcrt.exe
and put it in the rw1063\bin directory. Removing
msvcrt.dll from that directory reverts to the standard
behaviour. It seems that on some versions of Windows (but not
2000/XP) you also need to put the rw1063\bin directory
early in your path.
This fix has solved other problems too, for example incorrect results in the date-time functions. However, you are probably better off re-installing Windows.
for example update.packages and the menu items on
the Packages menu.
We have had several reports of this, although they do work for us on all of our machines. There are two known possible fixes.
(a) Use the alternative internet2.dll by starting R
with the flag --internet2 (see How do I install R
for Windows?) which uses the Internet Explorer internals (and
so needs Internet Explorer 4 or later installed).
(b) A proxy needs to be set up: see ?download.file.
Some users have found that Rgui.exe fails to start,
exiting with a "Floating- point invalid operation" or other low
level error. This error may also happen in the middle of a session.
In some cases where we have tracked this down, it was due to bugs
in the video driver on the system in question: it makes changes to
the floating point control word which are incompatible with R.
(Good practice would restore the control word to the state it was
in when the driver code was called.) For example, one user reported
that the virtual screen manager JSP2 caused this crash.
These errors are essentially impossible for us to fix or work around. The only solution we know of is for the user to replace the buggy driver that is causing the error.
Yes, but you will need a lot of tools to do so, unless the
author or the maintainers of the bin/windows/contrib
section on CRAN have been kind enough to provide a pre-compiled
version for Windows as a .zip file.
You can install pre-compiled packages either from CRAN or from a
local .zip file by using
install.packages: see its help page. There are menu
items on the Packages menu to provide a
point-and-click interface to package installation.
Note that the pre-compiled versions on CRAN are unsupported: see http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/ReadMe.
If there is not a pre-compiled version or that is not up-to-date
or you prefer compiling from source, make sure you installed the
necessary files from rw1063.exe. Then read the file
readme.packages. You will need to collect and install
several tools to use this: you can download them via the portal at
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/.
Once you have done so, just run Rcmd INSTALL pkgname.
To check the package (including running all the examples on its
help pages and in its test suite, if any) use Rcmd check
pkgname: see the `Writing R Extensions' manual.
Note that this is rather so tricky; please do ensure that you have followed the instructions exactly. At least 90% of the questions asked are because people have not done so.
rw1063\library directory.You can install packages anywhere and use the environment
variable R_LIBS (see How do I set
environment variables?) to point to the library
location(s).
Suppose your packages are installed in p:\myRlib.
Then you can EITHER
set the environment variable R_LIBS to p:\myRlib
OR use a package by, e.g.
library(MASS, lib.loc="p:/myRlib")
The HTML search only works for packages installed in
rw1063\library.
To update the HTML indices after you have installed a
pre-compiled package, run at the R prompt.
> link.html.help()
This is done automatically when installing from the Packages
menu or by install.packages(), and when
help.start is run, provided you have write permission
in rw1063\library.
The following conditions need to hold for functions in a package you installed.
rw1063\library.CONTENTS file in its
top-level directory.If those all hold true, this works for us.
If the help search system does not work at all, this probably indicates that Java support is either not installed or not enabled in your browser. Recent versions of browsers have made Java support optional: for example it is optional in Netscape 6/7 and in Opera, and may not be installed for IE6 on Windows XP.
Is the package compiled for this version of R? Many of the packages need to be compiled for a fairly recent version. (As from version 1.5.0, R will warn if a package is used that was built under a later version.)
You can tell the version the package was compiled for by looking
at the Built: line in its DESCRIPTION
file or at the Version tab of its DLL (if it has one)
in the libs directory. (Right-click on the DLL in
Windows Explorer and select Version tab of the
Properties, or use the DLL.version
function inside R.) If there is no Built: line or
version tab, the package was compiled too long ago.
For package tcltk to work (try
demo(tkdensity) or demo(tkttest) after
library(tcltk)) you need to have Tcl installed.
Download ActiveTcl 8.3.x from http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActiveTcl/
and install it. (Most of the installers that ActiveTcl uses will
put the bin directory containing the Tcl and Tk DLLs
in your path, but you should check. From R, run
Sys.getenv("PATH") to do so.) Note that you do need
8.3.x and not 8.4.0: follow the links to 8.4.0 and you will find
8.3.x available there. (If you build R from the sources yourself
you can configure it to use 8.4.0.)
You then need to set the environment variable
TCL_LIBRARY (see How do I set
environment variables?), to something like c:/Program
Files/Tcl/lib/tcl8.3. (The startup code for the package will
warn you if this is unset. NB: do not quote the path, even if as
here it contains spaces. If you forget, you can set the variable
inside R by something like
Sys.putenv("TCL_LIBRARY"="c:/Program Files/Tcl/lib/tcl8.3")
.) Similarly, you can set the path if needed by something like
Sys.putenv(PATH=paste(Sys.getenv("PATH"), "c:/Tcl/bin", sep = ";"))
They may well not work between packages installed in different libraries. This is solved under Unix using symbolic links which Windows does not implement.
update.packages() failsYou may not be able to update a package which is in use: Windows
`locks' the package's DLL when it is loaded. So use
update.packages() (or the menu equivalent) in a new
session.
If you put library(foo) in your
.Rprofile you will need to start R with
--vanilla to be able to update package
foo.
Rgui.exe and <Ctrl-break> or <Ctrl-C> in
Rterm.exe: <Ctrl-C> is used for copying in the
GUI version.Rgui.exe, the
menu item `Help | Console' will give details. For
Rterm.exe see file README.rterm.help.start() does not automatically send
help requests to the browser: use
options(htmlhelp=TRUE) to turn this on.source()) can be specified
with either "/" or "\\".system() is slightly different: see its help page
and that of shell().You have read the README.rw1063? There are file
menus on the R console, pager and graphics windows. You can source
and save from those menus, and copy the graphics to
png, jpeg, bmp,
postscript, PDF or metafile.
There are right-click menus giving shortcuts to menu items, and
optionally toolbars with buttons giving shortcuts to frequent
operations.
If you resize the R console the options(width=) is
automatically set to the console width (unless disabled in the
configuration file).
The graphics has a history mechanism. As
README.rw1063 says:
`The History menu allows the recording of plots. When plots have been recorded they can be reviewed by <PgUp> and <PgDn>, saved and replaced. Recording can be turned on automatically (the Recording item on the list) or individual plots can be added (Add or the <INS> key). The whole plot history can be saved to or retrieved from an R variable in the global environment.There is only one graphics history shared by all the windows devices.'
The R console and graphics windows have configuration files
stored in the RHOME\etc directory called
Rconsole and Rdevga; you can keep
personal copies in your HOME directory. They contain
comments which should suffice for you to edit them to your
preferences. For more details see ?Rconsole. There is
a Preferences editor invoked from the Edit menu which
can be used to edit the file Rconsole.
The graphics system asks Windows for the number of pixels per
inch in the X and Y directions, and uses that to size graphics
(which in R are in units of inches). Sometimes the answer is a
complete invention, and in any case Windows will not know exactly
how the horizontal and vertical size have been set on a CRT. You
can specify correct values either in the call to
windows or as options: see ?windows.
(Typically these are of the order of 80.)
On one of our systems, the screen height is reported as 240mm, and the width as 300mm in 1280 x 1024 mode and 320mm in 1280 x 960 and 1600 x 1200 modes. In fact it is a 21" monitor and 400mm x 300mm!
You may want to do this from within a function, for example when
calling identify or readline. Use the
function bringToTop(). With its default argument it
brings the active graphics window to the top and gives it focus.
With argument -1 it brings the console to the top and
gives it focus.
This works for Rgui.exe in MDI and SDI modes, and
can be used for graphics windows from Rterm.exe
(although Windows may not always act on it).
Have you changed the working directory?: see Q5.2.
Use the `File | Change Dir...' menu item to select a new working directory: this defaults to the last directory you loaded a file from. The workspace is saved in the working directory. You can also save a snapshot of the workspace from the `Save Workspace...' menu item.
From the command line you can change the working directory by
the function setwd: see its help page.
Yes. All ports of R use the same format for workspaces, so they are interchangeable (for the same 1.x.? version of R, at least).
for example, in the console and to annotate graphs.
We believe this is possible by setting suitable fonts in the
Rconsole and Rdevga configuration files (see Q4.2). You can specify
additional fonts in Rdevga, and use them by
par(font=, font.lab=, font.main=, font.sub=)
Nineteen fonts are specified (as 1 to 19) by default: you can add to these (up to 13 more) or replace them.
You need to specify a font in Rconsole (see Q4.2) that supports
Latin1 encoding. The default, Courier New, does on our
systems, as does FixedSys. This may be a problem in
other locales, especially for non-Western European languages.
Support for these characters within Rterm depends
on the environment (the terminal window and shell, including locale
settings) within which it is run as well as the font used by the
terminal window.
This is deliberate: the console output is buffered and re-written in chunks to be faster and less distracting. You can turn buffering off or on from the `Misc' menu or the right-click menu: <Ctrl-W> toggles the setting.
If you are sourcing R code or writing from a function, there is
another option. A call to the R function
flush.console() will write out the buffer and so
update the console.
They only seem to be truncated: that $ at the end indicates you can scroll the window to see the rest of the line. Use the horizontal scrollbar or the <CTRL + left/right arrow> keys to scroll horizontally.
Get the R sources. Suppose you want to compile R-1.6.2. Start in
a directory whose path does not contain spaces, and run
tar zxvf R-1.6.2.tgz cd R-1.6.2 cd src\gnuwin32
Now read the INSTALL file and set up all the tools
needed. Then you can just use make, sit back and wait.
(A complete build takes about 5 minutes on a 1GHz PIII with a fast
local disc.)
You may need to compile under a case-honouring file system: we
found that a samba-mounted file system (which maps all
file names to lower case) did not work.
Fast BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, http://www.netlib.org/blas/faq.html)
routines are used to speed up numerical linear algebra. There is
support in the R sources for the `tuned' BLAS called ATLAS (http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net).
The savings can be appreciable: on a 366MHz PIIM and a 1000 x 1000
matrix La.svd took 182 sec with the standard BLAS and
59 sec with ATLAS. Because ATLAS is tuned to a particular chip we
can't use it generally: the optimal routines for a PIII or an
Athlon XP are quite different and neither will not run at all on a
PII.
BLAS support is supplied by the single DLL
R_HOME\bin\Rblas.dll, and you can add a fast BLAS just
by replacing that. Replacements for some of the more common chips
are available on CRAN in directory
bin/windows/contrib/ATLAS.
If you are building R from source, in the file
MkRules there are macros USE_ATLAS and
ATLAS_PATH. Set USE_ATLAS = YES and
ATLAS_PATH to where the ATLAS libraries are located.
You will need to make the libraries yourself: none of the binaries
we have seen are compiled for the correct compiler.
We strongly encourage you to do this via building an R
package: see the `Writing R Extensions' manual. In any
event you should install the parts of the R system for building R
packages (in rw1063.exe), and get and install the
tools (including Perl) and compilers mentioned in the file
readme.packages contained therein. Then you can
use
...\bin\Rcmd SHLIB foo.c bar.f
to make foo.dll. Use ...\bin\Rcmd SHLIB
--help for further options, or see ?SHLIB.
If you want to use Visual C++, Borland C++ or other compilers,
see the appropriate section in readme.packages.
You will need a suitable version of gdb: we
normally use that from the Cygwin distribution. Debugging under
Windows is often a fraught process, and sometimes does not work at
all. If all you need is a just-in-time debugger to catch
crashes, consider Dr. Mingw from http://mefriss1.swan.ac.uk/~jfonseca/gnu-win32/software/drmingw/.
That will be able to pinpoint the error, most effectively if you
build a version of R with debugging information as described
below.
First, build a version of the R system with debugging
information by
make clean make DEBUG=T
and make a debug version of your package by
make pkgclean-mypkg make DEBUG=T pkg-mypkg
Then you can debug by
gdb /path/to/rw1063/bin/Rgui.exe
However, note
gdb will only be able to find the source code if
we run in the location where the source was compiled
(rw1063/src/gnuwin32 for the main system,
rw1063/src/library/mypkg/src for a package), unless
told otherwise by the directory command. It is most
convenient to set a list of code locations via
directory commands in the file .gdbinit
in the directory from which gdb is run.tukeyline in package eda might be
gdb ../../../../bin/Rgui.exe
(gdb) break WinMain
(gdb) run
[ stops with R.dll loaded ]
(gdb) break R_ReadConsole
(gdb) continue
[ stops with console running ]
(gdb) continue
Rconsole> library(eda)
(gdb) break tukeyline
(gdb) clear R_ReadConsole
(gdb) continue
Fortran symbols need an underline appended.
mingw version of gdb. It does
often work with the cygwin version.You need to do two things:
(a) Write a wrapper to export the symbols you want to call from
R as extern "C".
(b) Include the C++ libraries in the link to make the DLL.
Suppose X.cc contains your C++ code, and
X_main.cc is the wrapper, as in the example in
`Writing R Extensions'. Then build the DLL by
(gcc)
...\bin\Rcmd SHLIB X.cc X_main.cc
or (VC++, which requires extension .cpp)
cl /MT /c X.cpp X_main.cpp link /dll /out:X.dll /export:X_main X.obj X_main.obj
or (Borland C++, which also requires extension
.cpp)
bcc32 -u- -WDE X.cpp X_main.cpp
and call the entry point(s) in X_R, such as
X_main. Construction of static variables will occur
when the DLL is loaded, and destruction when the DLL is unloaded,
usually when R terminates.
Note that you will not see the messages from this example in the GUI console: see the next section.
This example is in package cxx_0.0-x.tar.gz in the
src/contrib/Devel section on CRAN, and that can be
compiled as a package in the usual way on Windows.
The Rgui.exe console is a Windows application:
writing to stdout or stderr will not
produce output in the console. (This will work with
Rterm.exe.) Use Rprintf or
REprintf instead. These are declared in header file
R_ext/PrtUtil.h.
Note that output from the console is delayed (see The output to the console seems to be delayed), so that you will not normally see any output before returning to the R prompt.
Writing to Fortran output writes to a file, not the
Rgui console. Use one of the subroutines
dblepr, intpr or realpr
documented in the `Writing R Extensions' manual.
Note that output from the console is delayed (see The
output to the console seems to be delayed), so that you will
not normally see any output before returning to the R prompt even
when using the xxxpr subroutines.
The console, pagers and graphics window all run in the same
thread as the R engine. To allow the console etc to respond to
Windows events, call R_ProcessEvents() periodically
from your compiled code. If you want output to be updated on the
console, call R_FlushConsole() and then
R_ProcessEvents().
ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk