[Rd] Spurious output white line in R script (PR#8631)

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Thu Feb 23 06:58:51 CET 2006


On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, François Pinard wrote:

> [Simon Urbanek]
>
>> I don't see the bug here ... you may want to explain how this  behavior
>> conflicts with the documentation.
>
> Oh, sorry.  I merely surmised that R developers were aware of the
> meaning of "--slave" option.

We are.

> Within the output resulting of command
> "man R", one reads:
>
>       --slave
>              Make R run as quietly as possible
>
> So, I was not expecting R, running with that option activated, to
> "volunteer" white lines. :-)

But Simon said `with the documentation'.  Not doing what you expected is
not a bug.  Can you please point us to documentation which says that
end-of-file produces no output?

This does appear to be deliberate behaviour from

void end_Rmainloop(void)
{
     Rprintf("\n");
     /* run the .Last function. If it gives an error, will drop back to 
main
        loop. */
     R_CleanUp(SA_DEFAULT, 0, 1);
}

and I think it is necessary, as R might well have a partial line of output 
queued up for the console.  So this is probably `as quietly as possible'.

[...]


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


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