Question

I’m having problems running pgfSweave from the command line. In the pgfSweave manual it states that the package must be installed from source in order to be run as:

R CMD pgfSweave myfile.Rnw

So I installed using:

install.packages("pgfSweave", type = "source")

and the package appeared to install without a hitch. I then tried running the above R CMD (directly from a bash shell and also from within a make file) and received the following error:

/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/Rcmd: line 61: exec: pgfSweave: not found

I’ve read the manuals but haven’t come across anyone mentioning this problem. I’m running R version 2.14.0, OSX 10.5.8, and pgfSweave version 1.2.1

(Btw, I should note that I can use the following command from within R with no problem:

pgfSweave(file = "myfile.Rnw", compile.tex = FALSE)

but i’d like to use a make file and do everything from the command line)

Answer 1

The pgfSweave manual provides some nice direction about how you can get the command-line interface up and running. Here’s the key bit, from page 13 of the manual (warning: pdf):

In versions 0.7.0, pgfSweave got an R CMD command line interface. On Unix alikes (including Mac OS X)
a symbolic link $R HOME/bin/pgfsweave to $R HOME/library/pgfSweave/exec/pgfsweave-script.R.
On Windows a copy of the script is made instead. This script is only installed if pgfSweave is installed
from source.

So, for the Mac OS, you just need to place a symbolic link named pgfsweave in $R_HOME/bin/, pointing to $R_HOME/library/pgfSweave/exec/pgfsweave-script.R. ($R_HOME is the directory path got by typing R.home() at the R command line.)

---

In case you want more details about how this is supposed to be implemented at the time of package installation, have a look at the script install-script.R in $R_HOME/library/pgfSweave/exec/. It includes separate branches, to be executed depending on the type of operating system, and concludes with this reassuring message (to be printed if installation of the symbolic link fails):

cat('\n***********************\n')
cat('Failed to install custom pgfsweave script:\n')
cat('  Thats ok! You can manually install it later.\n')
cat('***********************\n\n')