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R and sra toolkit - odd system() behavior


In order to extract some fastq data from NCBI's sequence read archive I've downloaded and installed the sra toolkit for Windows. In order to test if it is setup correctly, I opened cmd, navigated to the directory and typed in the command fasterq-dump --split-files SRR7647019. It downloads the file SRR7647019.sra as expected and splits it into fastq files.

Then I've tried the same command in RStudio, wrapping the system() command around it: system(fasterq-dump --split-files SRR7647019). However, R always returns

An error occured: unrecognized tool FASTER~2.EXE If this continues to happen, please contact the SRA Toolkit at https://trace.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/sra/

as well as the number 75 (probably an error code).

Any idea why I'm not able to run fasterq-dump.exe from R? How could it be solved?

Thanks a lot for suggestions in advance!


Solution

  • Sometimes it helps to call the terminal shell explicitly to bypass the environmental variables which might get overwritten by RStudio:

    system("cmd.exe /k fasterq-dump --split-files SRR7647019")