Redirect system2 stdout to a file on windows

Question

According to the manual, the stdout argument of the system2 function can redirect output to a file. This seems to work on unix, however I can't get it to work on windows. The toy example below, no out.txt or err.txt files are created. I tried sending it to an existing file, or expand the full file path, but with no success:

setwd(tempdir())
system2("whoami", stdout="out.txt", stderr="err.txt")
file.exists("out.txt")

Am I doing something wrong or is this a limitation in system2 ?

Sanburn

Your snippet shows system(), not system2(). Typo? – Legality

Good question. system2 doesn't seem to be behaving as advertised. Especially given that the Windows and UNIX versions of system2 are implemented using different source code, you'd think this difference in behavior (if intended) would be mentioned in ?system2. – Gibb

OK in that case I'll move it to r-devel. – Sanburn

Thanks. Uwe Ligges here mentions that portability was the motivation for creating system2(), so this is presumably a discrepancy R-core will care about. (FWIW, I just tried Grothendieck's proposed fix (from R-devel), and it doesn't work for me, running an up-to-date R on Windows XP...) – Gibb

Answer 1

I'm quite convinced now this is a bug in RGui.exe in windows. I filed a bug report here: https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15393

Sanburn

Thanks for your answer. Had the same issue. – Funk