Running a Powershell script from R using system2() rather than system()

Question

I have a PowerShell script (say at C:\directoryName\coolScript.ps1). If I want to invoke this from R, I can run

system('powershell -file "C:\\directoryName\\coolScript.ps1"')

If I try to do the same with system2(), it returns no error, but the script is not executed. Since the documentation for the system() command says that system2() "is recommended for new code", I would like to use system2(). Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Unlike with system(), the command argument to system2() is always quoted by shQuote, so it must be a single command without arguments, while arguments are passed to command with the args argument.

Both of them works :

system("sed -i 's/oldword\\s/oldword/g' d:/junk/x/test.tex")
system2("sed", args=c("-i", "s/oldword\\s/newword/g", "d:/junk/x/test.tex"))

I would try :

system2("powershell", args=c("-file", "C:\\directoryName\\coolScript.ps1"))

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Another thing you should be aware of is that there are two versions of the R executable in R-3.2.1\bin\i386 (32-bit) and R-3.2.1\bin\x64 (64-bit). By default only the first is installed on 32-bit versions of Windows, but both on 64-bit OSes. The 32 bits version of R will invoke the 32 bits version of PowerShell and the same for the 64 bits version so be careful to use Set-ExecutionPolicy for the right one.