R help - Feb 2015 - Terminating a program using R

Hi

I would like to query that if it is possible for R to terminate a program
such as notepad, word, etc.?
If yes, what kind of function should I use?

Thank you very much.





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On 10/02/2015 07:55, Ssuhanchen wrote:
> Hi
>
> I would like to query that if it is possible for R to terminate a program
> such as notepad, word, etc.?
> If yes, what kind of function should I use?
The POSIX way to do this is to use 'kill', so try ??kill in your R 
process or use system() to call your favourite OS utility to do this.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK

> I would like to query that if it is possible for R to terminate a program
such as
> notepad, word, etc.?
pskill from the tools package says it supports the Windows system call
'TerminateProcess'.

You can get a process's ID using the windows command line
'tasklist'.

I got this to work on my text editor process (TextPad) using

pname <- "TextPad.exe"      #Amend to your process name
tl <- system('tasklist', intern=TRUE)       #Get the task list 
pid.line <- tl[grep(pname, tl)]                #Find the row that matches
[WARNING - I assumed only one]
pid.char <- gsub(paste("^",pname," *([0-9]+).*",
sep=""), "\\1", pid.line)
                                                               #Extract the PID 
pid <- as.numeric(pid.char)                   #Convert to integer
pskill(pid)                                               #Kill the process


You'll have to tweak that if you have more than one process with the same
name, and also to check for nonexistence of an expected process.


S Ellison



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