PATH dilemma in `system()`

[howardbaik]

This issue stems from a discussion with @seankross .

Background

In macOS, I installed coqui TTS and started using it in the Terminal. To search for the path to the tts library, I type which tts in the Terminal, which outputs /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base/bin/tts. To check whether users of text2speech had installed tts, I wanted to replicate this command in this package using system("which tts"), which returns an object with an attribute of status 1 (failure).

Problem

This has to do with the PATH environment variable. When I run system("PATH=\"/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base/bin\" /usr/bin/which tts"), or system2("/usr/bin/which", "tts", env = "PATH=\"/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base/bin\""), I get an 0 error code (success). Its nice that I get the correct path to tts, when I manually specify its path, but I want to programmatically find the PATH without needing to manually provide it to R.

Alternative

I can ask the user to provide the PATH (for ex, /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base/bin), and I can check if system("PATH=\"/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base/bin\" /usr/bin/which tts") returns a status code of 0 (success).