Step Six: Fixing your Path

After installing RTools, it’s a good idea to check your path. Step 2 showed you how to get to your path, so go to your path variable and cut and past it into a text editor. In case you need help it’s always good to have this handy. Also, if you make any mistakes you can revert.

Here is what my path looks like:

c:\Rtools\bin;

c:\Rtools\MinGW\bin;

C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin;

c:\Program Files\R\R-2.13.0\bin\x64;

%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;c:\Program Files (x86)\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static;c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio Shared\DLLShared\;c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio Shared\DLLShared\;c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio Shared\12.0\DLLShared\

The order of the tools is important.  As the documentation explains:

Finally, the Rtools installer will optionally edit your PATH variable as follows:

PATH=c:\Rtools\bin;c:\Rtools\MinGW\bin;c:\R\bin;<others>

(where you will substitute appropriate directories for the ones listed
above, but please keep the path in the same order as shown. LaTeX and
the HTML Help Workshop should be installed among the "others".)

There are two things to note. First, you must have a path to Rcmd.exe.  on My system its “c:\Program Files\R\R-2.13.0\bin\x64;”  I could also provide a path to the 32 bit version. Make sure you have that in your path. Also, I need to add a path for Windows HTML Help workshop.

C:\Program Files (x86)\HTML Help Workshop;

So after editing  it looks like this.

c:\Rtools\bin;c:\Rtools\MinGW\bin;c:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin;c:\Program Files (x86)\HTML Help Workshop;c:\Program Files\R\R-2.13.0\bin\x64;%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;c:\Program Files (x86)\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static;c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio Shared\DLLShared\;c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio Shared\DLLShared\;c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio Shared\12.0\DLLShared\

Next, we will proceed to step 7 and restart our system. I assume this is required to update the PATH variable after changing it.

On to step 7.