[R] Modyfing PATH in Windows Installer for R

Duncan Murdoch
Mon, 06 Dec 2004 14:40:23 -0000

On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 14:43:46 +0100, Henrik Andersson
<h.andersson at nioo.knaw.nl> wrote :

>Just a small suggestion since Windows have a file system not designed
>for command line use...

Hmm?  I'm not sure what you mean by that.  As far as the command line
is concerned, Windows and Unix file systems are pretty similar.

>Would it be possible to add the possibility of automatically
>adding/modifying the path to the R executables in the windows installer
>program?

You mean modifying the PATH environment variable?  I think it would be
possible to do this, but I don't think it's a good idea:

 - Users who use a command line interface probably know how to do this
themselves, and others don't need it.

 - Users who use a command line interface use a large variety of
different mechanisms to set their path, and it would be hard for the R
installer to do anything helpful and not harmful to automatically
change what they've done.

For example, I set my path in F:/cygwin/etc/profile, but I may be the
only R user who uses that particular file...

Duncan Murdoch