searchGRASSW: Search for valid GRASS GIS installations on Windows

In link2GI: Linking Geographic Information Systems, Remote Sensing and Other Command Line Tools

Search for valid GRASS GIS installations on Windows

Description

Searches for GRASS GIS installations on **Windows** using a *bounded* set of plausible installation roots (no full-disk crawl). The function supports:

• OSGeo4W / QGIS-style layouts via <root>/apps/grass/grass*/etc/VERSIONNUMBER

• Standalone GRASS installs via <Program Files>/GRASS GIS */etc/VERSIONNUMBER

• Optional per-user OSGeo4W installs under <USERPROFILE>/AppData/Local/Programs/OSGeo4W

Usage

searchGRASSW(DL = "C:/", quiet = TRUE)

searchGRASSW(DL = "C:/", quiet = TRUE)

Arguments

DL	Character. Search root (e.g. '"C:/"').
quiet	Logical. Suppress messages.

Details

The argument DL can be a full path or a Windows drive root (e.g. "C:" or "C:/"). Drive roots are expanded to a fixed set of candidate directories: OSGeo4W64, OSGeo4W, Program Files, Program Files (x86).

This function is intentionally conservative to remain fast and deterministic on large Windows volumes. It does **not** recurse the entire drive.

If multiple installations are present under the searched roots, all are returned. Version parsing extracts the first x.y[.z...] pattern from the first line of VERSIONNUMBER.

Value

Returns FALSE if no installation was detected. Otherwise returns a data.frame with columns:

instDir

Root directory of the installation candidate.

version

Parsed version string (from VERSIONNUMBER) or NA.

installation_type

One of "osgeo4w", "qgis", "standalone".

The result is sorted by decreasing semantic version (unknown versions treated as 0.0.0).

'FALSE' or a 'data.frame' with columns 'instDir', 'version', 'installation_type'.

Examples

## Not run: 
# Search from the C: drive root (bounded roots, no full-disk scan)
searchGRASSW("C:/", quiet = FALSE)

# Search a concrete directory only
searchGRASSW("C:/OSGeo4W64", quiet = FALSE)

# Drive letter without slash is accepted
searchGRASSW("C:", quiet = TRUE)

## End(Not run)

link2GI documentation built on Dec. 23, 2025, 9:09 a.m.