From maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch  Fri May 19 20:11:52 2000
From: maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch (maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch)
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 21:11:52 +0200 (MET DST)
Subject: [Rd] system(.., ignore.stderr = TRUE)  problem on Solaris (PR#547)
Message-ID: <200005191911.VAA02042@pubhealth.ku.dk>

(i.e. my version Solaris, see below...)

Note that system() is not only implemented quite system-dependently
(which you'd very much expect!) but also Unix and Windows have quite
different arguments apart from the first two.

Hence all the following is ``Unix-only'' :


A user stumbled across this when using read.table.url(.) on a platform
where no "wget" is installed: 

The data is read ok, but an ugly message appears *before* the command is
completed :
	  -------------------
	  sh: wget: not found
	  -------------------
which made the user believe that the data wasn't read properly.

The problem is easily tracked to the system(..) call in download.file()
{which does not (yet) have the "ignore.stderr = TRUE" setting, btw}
and found that on our Solaris environment, 
the ignore.stderr argument does not seem to have any effect, i.e.

  > system("bla", ignore.stderr = TRUE)

gives the same as  system("bla"), namely
  
  sh: bla: not found
 
On my Linux environment,  ignore.stderr works as advertized.

Further note that  help(system)  should probably also say something about which
shell may or may not be used (I think we decided that we want it to be `sh'
on Unix).


--please do not edit the information below-- {did anyway ;=)}

Version:
 platform = sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1
 arch = sparc
 os = solaris2.5.1
 system = sparc, solaris2.5.1

 --- either R-devel of today, or also 1.0.1 ---

 year = 2000
 month = May
 day = 18
 language = R

Search Path:
 .GlobalEnv, package:SfS, Autoloads, package:base



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[Rd] system(.., ignore.stderr = TRUE) problem on Solaris (PR#547)
maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch