[R] difference in behavior between batch and source

markleeds at verizon.net markleeds at verizon.net
Sun Jun 4 02:06:02 CEST 2006


Hi : I am using R 2.20 on windows XP and I have a REALLY
long read.table statement because the col.names argument
has 440 character strings in it. ( I use python to write R code ).
When I run the read.table statement inside an R program
( the R program only consists of the read.table statement )
using the source command in an interactive R session,
everything works fine. But, if I take the same program
and try to run it using R CMD BATCH program name , 
the .Rout file shows me that the execution gets halted at
one of the col.names arguments but there is no error message.
it just says "execution halted".

So, I am thinking that this may have to do with some limit
in R for how long the col.names argument can be ( or
any command for that matter ) ? But, the same program works using the source command and I would think that the source command
still has to read theline in somewhere  ?

What makes me think even more that the problem has something to
do with the length of the command is that, as a test,
I took the tread.table command and copied and pasted it into
an interactive session to see if it would run that way.
What was interesting was that the whole command did not get pasted and the pasting stopped at exactly the same place that the .Rout file showed that it stopped during BATCH mode.

I can't send the command right now because I don't have email at
the location where I am working but I may be able
to send it later ? Any thoughts, suggestions or solutions
would be really appreciated because I need to be able
to get this program to work using BATCH mode.

                                      Thanks a lot.



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