Question

At work R is not entitled to access the internet (no-the setinternet thing doesnt work-despite old explorer running decently). My work computer is windows based and my home computer is a mac. Is it possible to devise a script for my mac that would download the windows packages that are in my mac r library? This, so that I can bring them to work and install them from zip or something on a USB stick.

Answer 1

It wasn’t particularly easy, since there are quite a few safeguards you need to disable, but this will download one package (“rms”) in win.binary format to my Downloads folder:

> options(available_packages_filters=c("R_version",  "duplicates", "license/FOSS") )
> getOption("available_packages_filters")
[1] "R_version"    "duplicates"   "license/FOSS"

> download.packages(pkgs="rms", repos="http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN", 
    destdir="~/Downloads", 
    contriburl =contrib.url(getOption("repos"), "win.binary"),
    type="win.binary")
#----------------------
trying URL 'http://cran.cnr.Berkeley.edu/bin/windows/contrib/2.15/rms_3.5-0.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 937176 bytes (915 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 915 Kb

     [,1]  [,2]                       
[1,] "rms" "~/Downloads/rms_3.5-0.zip"

You should be able to substitute installed.packages()[ , "Package"] for the “rms” argument to pkgs=