User manual

Chapter 3: Interacting with statistical programs 23
We have two older commands, now deprecated, for accessing ESS processes on remote
computers. See Section 3.4 [S+elsewhere and ESS-elsewhere], page 23.
3.4 S+elsewhere and ESS-elsewhere
These commands are now deprecated. We recommend ‘ess-remote’. We have two versions
of the elsewhere function. ‘S+elsewhere’ is specific for the S-Plus program. The more
general function ‘ESS-elsewhere’ is not as stable.
1. Enter ‘M-x S+elsewhere’. You will be prompted for a starting directory. I usually give
it my project directory on the local machine, say ‘~myname/myproject/’
Or enter ‘M-x ESS-elsewhere’. You will be prompted for an ESS program and for
a starting directory. I usually give it my project directory on the local machine, say
‘~myname/myproject/’
2. The ‘*S+3*’ buffer will appear with a prompt from the local operating system (the
unix prompt on a unix workstation or with cygwin bash on a PC, or the msdos prompt
on a PC without bash). emacs may freeze because the cursor is at the wrong place.
Unfreeze it with ‘C-g’ then move the cursor to the end with ‘M->’. With ‘S+elsewhere’
the buffer name is based on the name of the ESS program.
3. Enter ‘telnet [e-mail]’ (or ‘ssh [e-mail]’). You will
be prompted for your password on the remote machine. Use ‘M-x send-invisible’
before typing the password itself.
4. Before starting the ESS process, type ‘stty -echo nl’ at the unix prompt. The ‘-echo’
turns off the echo, the ‘nl’ turns off the newline that you see as ‘^M’.
5. You are now talking to the unix prompt on the other machine in the ‘*S+3*’ buffer. cd
into the directory for the current project and start the ESS process by entering ‘Splus’
or ‘R’ or ‘sas -stdio’ as appropriate. If you can login remotely to your Windows 2000,
then you should be able to run ‘Sqpe’ on the Windows machine. I haven’t tested this
and no-one has reported their tests to me. You will not be able to run the GUI through
this text-only connection.
6. Once you get the S or R or SAS prompt, then you are completely connected. All the
‘C-c C-n’ and related commands work correctly in sending commands from ‘myfile.s’
or ‘myfile.r’ on the PC to the ‘*S+3*’ buffer running the S or R or SAS program on
the remote machine.
7. Graphics on the remote machine works fine. If you run the X window system on the
remote unix machine you should be able to display them in ‘xfree86’ on your PC. If
you don’t run X Windows, or X11, then you can write graphics to the postscript device
and copy it to your PC with dired and display it with ghostscript.
3.5 Changing the startup actions
If you do not wish ESS to prompt for a starting directory when starting a new process, set
the variable ess-ask-for-ess-directory to nil. In this case, the starting directory will
be set using one of the following methods:
1. If the variable ess-directory-function stores the name of a function, the value re-
turned by this function is used. The default for this variable is nil.