This 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, (rw1020 or later); the current version is
often called something like rw1020 (although not
officially).
Go to any CRAN site (see
http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html for a list), navigate to
the bin/windows/windows-NT/base directory and collect
the files you need. You will need at least the files
rwXxxxb1.zip rwXxxxb2.zip
rwXxxxh.zip (text help) or rwXxxxch.zip (Compiled HTML help)
and you may want rwXxxxwh.zip (the Windows help
files) or rwXxxxw.zip (the HTML format help files),
rwXxxxl.zip (the LaTeX format help files, used for
offline printing), or rwXxxxd?.zip (the draft manuals,
in PDF).
Optionally, you can download the installer,
rwinst.exe.
First, you need Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000: 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).
The simplest way is to run the installer (double-click on the
icon for rwinst.exe and navigate its wizard-like
pages). Alternatively, choose a location and unzip the zip files
(with a tool that preserves long file names and the directory
structure: we recommend the INFO-ZIP project's unzip).
All the files will unpack into a directory called
rwXxxx, for some Xxxx.
Choose a working directory for R. Make a shortcut to
rwXxxx\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 --max-mem-size=40M. You
can also set environment variables at the end of the Target field,
for example R_LIBS=e:/R/library.
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.
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.
It depends what you want to print.
dev.print().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 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. The latest versions of ESS (e.g. 5.1.18) 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").
Yes, of course. The easy way is to see if a pre-compiled binary
version of the package is available: look on CRAN at
bin/windows/windows-NT/contrib. If there is, download the
zip file and unpack it in the rwXxxx\library
directory, using unzip or similar, or using the
installer rwinst.exe. Perhaps even easier is to use
the R function install.packages(): check out its help
page.
If there is not a binary version or that is not up-to-date or
you prefer compiling from source, get rwXxxxsp.zip
from the distribution (see Q1.1) and unpack it in
rwXxxx. Then cd src\gnuwin32 and read
README.packages. You will need to collect and install
several tools to use this. Once you have done so, installation is
easy: just run Rcmd INSTALL pkgname. To check the
package (run all the examples on its help pages and in its test
suite, if any) use Rcmd check pkgname.
rwXxxx/library directory.You can install packages anywhere and use the environment
variable R_LIBS to point to the library location(s).
You can also set the R variable .lib.loc in your
.Rprofile or when running R.
Suppose your packages are installed in p:\mylibs.
Then you can EITHER
set the environment variable R_LIBS to p:\mylibs
OR put in the .Rprofile in the working directory or
your home directory
.lib.loc <- c("p:/mylibs", .Library)
OR use a package by, e.g.
library(MASS, lib.loc="p:/mylibs")
How you set an environment variable is system specific: in
Windows 9x you can set them in autoexec.bat or in an MS-DOS window
from which you launch Rgui / Rterm. Under
Windows NT/2000 you can use the control panel or the properties of
`My Computer'. You can also set them on the command line, for
example in the shortcut you could have
path_to_R\bin\Rgui.exe --vsize=10M R_LIBS=e:/R/library
and you can set variables in a file .Renviron in
the working directory or your home directory, for example
R_LIBS=e:/R/library R_VSIZE=10M R_NSIZE=400k
The order of precedence is the command line (flags before
variables) then .Renviron then the inherited
environment.
HTML help only works for packages installed in
rwXxxx\library.
To update the HTML help files after you have installed a binary package, run at the R prompt.
> link.html.help()
(Using install.packages() does this for you. The
source-code installation also does this automatically, and if you
have that installed you can use (preferably)
cd rwXxxx\src\gnuwin32\help make indices
The following conditions need to hold for functions in a package you installed.
rwXxxx\library.CONTENTS file in top-level
directory.If those all hold true, this works for us.
For package tcltk to work (try demo(tkdensity) or
demo(tkttest)) you need to have Tcl installed.
Download tcl832.exe (or use tcl831.exe if
you already have it) from <dev.scriptics.com>
and install it. (That will put the bin directory
containing the Tcl and Tk DLLs in your path). You then need to set
the environment variable TCL_LIBRARY, to something
like c:/Program Files/Tcl/lib/tcl8.3. (The startup
code for the package will warn you if this is unset, and Q3.2
explains how to set them.)
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.help.start() does not automatically send
help requests to the browser: use options(htmlhelp=T)
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? 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 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 the README 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.
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.
Yes. The converse (saving on Windows, loading on Unix) also works.
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.
This is deliberate: the console output is buffered and re-written in chunks to be 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 message. Use the horizontal scrollbar or the <CTRL+arrow> keys to scroll horizontally.
Get the R sources. Suppose you want to compile R-1.2.0.
tar zxvf R-1.2.0.tgz cd R-1.2.0 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 15 minutes on a 300MHz PII 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.
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/rwXxxx/bin/Rgui.exe
However, note
rwXxxx/src/gnuwin32 for the main system,
rwXxxx/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.
mingw32 version of gdb. It does
often work with the cygwin version.cygwin gdb was able to catch but which
terminated the mingw32 gdb.If you have an X server available on the PC, there is a version
of DDD available that runs under the cygwin emulation
layer (follow the links at
http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin) and provides a graphical user
interface to gdb. Another (Windows-native) GUI for
gdb is Insight, part of the latest
cygwin version of gdb
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_0.0-0.tar.gz in the
src/contrib/Devel section on CRAN, and that can be
compiled as 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.
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