[R] using Rterm under cygwin, no possiblity to delete characters

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You have to call Rterm.exe *from a command shell*.  `cygwin' is not a
command shell, but a collection of tools that provides several such.  So
we can only guess at what you are using.

Rterms runs satisfactorily in many shells (I use tcsh, others use Cygwin 
bash ...).  This is all described in the README and rw-FAQ files, 
for example.

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, Dewez Thomas wrote:

> Dear R-users,
> 
> When I call Rterm from cygwin, I have no options but typing the exact syntax
> the first time. If I happen to hit the "delete" key (backspace), R dies when
> I press enter saying :

backspace and delete are separate keys, so which did you mean?

> Error: ... (error concerning the function on the last line of text)
> Execution halted
> 
> Perhaps some of you have experienced this and found work arounds? One has to
> be pretty good to type without ever committing mistakes!
> 
> By the way, I am running Cygwin (cygwin_NT-5.0 release 1.5.10(0.116/4/2), I
> reinstalled everything fresh last week) on Win 2k and R 1.9.1. Although some
> of you find cygwin inefficient in many ways, I don't have the option to
> migrate to Linux.

The alternative is to use a Windows-native shell, such as tcsh.exe.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595