file.show {base} | R Documentation

## Display One or More Files

### Description

Display one or more files.

### Usage

    file.show(..., header = rep("", nfiles), title = "R Information",
              delete.file = FALSE, pager = getOption("pager"), encoding = "")

### Arguments

`...` | one or more character vectors containing the names of the files to be displayed. These will be tilde-expanded: see `path.expand`.
`header` | character vector (of the same length as the number of files specified in `...`) giving a header for each file being displayed. Defaults to empty strings.
`title` | an overall title for the display. If a single separate window is used for the display, `title` will be used as the window title. If multiple windows are used, their titles should combine the title and the file-specific header.
`delete.file` | should the files be deleted after display? Used for temporary files.
`pager` | the pager to be used.
`encoding` | character string giving the encoding to be assumed for the file(s).

### Details

This function provides the core of the R help system, but it can be used for other purposes as well, such as `page`.

How the pager is implemented is highly system-dependent.

The basic Unix version concatenates the files (using the headers) to a temporary file, and displays it in the pager selected by the `pager` argument, which is a character vector specifying a system command (usually `less`) to run on the set of files.

Most GUI systems will use a separate pager window for each file, and let the user leave it up while R continues running. The selection of such pagers could either be done using special pager names being intercepted by lower-level code (such as `"internal"` and `"console"` on Windows), or by letting `pager` be an R function which will be called with the same first four arguments as `file.show` and take care of interfacing to the GUI.

Not all implementations will honour `delete.file`.

### Author(s)

Ross Ihaka, Brian Ripley.

### See Also

`files`, `list.files`, `help`.

### Examples

    file.show(file.path(R.home("doc"), "COPYRIGHTS"))

[Package base version 2.6.0 Index]