Question

Hi i am using R on windows XP i have cygwin on my shell path
what i want to do is send a command to gawk via R shell command this way:
shell(“gawk “{print $1}””, m[1],”_”, h[i].”_79.7.dat””}
i get this error
Error: unexpected ‘{‘ in “shell(“gawk “{”
how can i fix this problem?
Thank you

Answer 1

escape your quotes. Example only (not sure what R shell syntax is)

shell("gawk \"{print $1}\"", m[1],"_", h[i]."_79.7.dat"")

experiment with escaping the quotes to get the correct result.

The other way is to build your gawk command string first , then pass to shell()