e1071
.
I'll leave it to the reader to find out what this package does and why it has
this name.
Packages are structured in the same way as the R
distribution, a compressed archive of code that can be built into the required
function library. Just download the package that you want, preferably to a
convenient place (I use /usr/local/R-pkg
) and then use the
following command to build it:
R CMD INSTALL /usr/local/R-pkg/package_1.0-2.tar.gz
of course substituting the correct path and package name. If you would like to avoid having the whole range of help files written, the option:
--no-xxxxx
may interest you, where xxxxx indicates a sort of documentation(example, latex, html or text). This will stop the program from generating that particular type of help.
lemons
, which is really embarrassing in the creativity stakes,
but I'm trying to maintain a modicum of honesty here.
Let's say you're about at my level of creativity and have decided to call
your file of functions mystuff
.
First you'll need a place to store your masterpiece.
Go to the directory library
just beneath the
R directory itself. Make a directory named
mystuff
, and a directory below that named R
.
You may have to become root (or administrator, i.e. THE BOSS of your system)
to do this. Now, save your file of R
functions into the mystuff/R
directory as (surprise!)
mystuff
. This repetition of names may seem mysterious. It is.
For the moment, just accept that this is how the system works.
Now you have to create a file in the mystuff
directory named
DESCRIPTION
that will look like this:
Package: mystuff Version: 1.0 Date: 13/1/2003 Author: Your name Maintainer: Your name Description: my ingenious functions Depends: (the names of any other libraries that your library needs to run) License: GPL Built: R 1.6.2; i586-pc-linux-gnu; Mon Jan 13 12:50:30 EST 2003
The last line can be copied from another DESCRIPTION file - it's only there to con the system into accepting the package. This is the absolute minimum necessary to be able to load your functions with the command:
library(mystuff)
This allows you access to your functions in any directory in which you start
R. You can also add the
library()
command to your
.First
file to automatically load your functions at startup.
If you're on a system that doesn't allow you access to the
R directory structure, you can still have
your functions. Just create the file of all the functions (for the sake of
propriety, you might call it mystuff.R
this time) and store it in a
directory to which you do have access (e.g. /home/jim/R
). You can
then put the following line in your .First
function and it will automatically load your functions.
source("/home/jim/R/mystuff.R")
This doesn't allow you to package up your functions so that the
INSTALL
command will neatly install them, or allow you to create
help files that will show up automatically on the list of packages.
So when you get some free time, have a look at
R-exts
and learn how to make real packages.