[R] command option for R CMD BATCH

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Try this:

gannet% cat month.R
x <- commandArgs()
print(x[length(x)])

gannet% R --slave --args January < month.R
[1] "January"


On Thu, 23 Nov 2006, Patrick Connolly wrote:

> I wish to use R CMD BATCH to run a small R function which reads a text
> file and plots a single graph to a PDF file.
>
>> version
>               _
> platform       x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
> arch           x86_64
> os             linux-gnu
> system         x86_64, linux-gnu
> status
> major          2
> minor          4.0
> year           2006
> month          10
> day            03
> svn rev        39566
> language       R
> version.string R version 2.4.0 (2006-10-03)
>>
>
> The text files are monthly data, (called lyrical names like
> October.txt or November.txt) and the end result of each run will be a
> PDF file called October.pdf, etc.
>
> It's simple enough to make a separate file for each month which has
> the command to call the R function, e.g.  October.r would be
> plot.month("October.txt")
> and use it like so:
>
> R CMD BATCH October.r /dev/null
> (the R function creates the name for the PDF file)
>
> or slightly more elegantly, a one line shell script that takes an argument:
> R CMD BATCH $1.r /dev/null
> (so that the script name and the name of the month will make a PDF
> file for that month)
>
> What I'd like to do is avoid the need to make the Month.r files and
> have the script pass the month information directly to the function
> that a single .r file would call.  If I brushed up on a bit of Perl, I
> might work out how to modify the shell script to do such a thing, but
> I suspect it should be simpler than that.
>
> I had thought of using litter for such a thing, but as I looked into
> it, I get the impression that's not the idea of litter.  (I'm also a
> bit reluctant to recompile R.)
>
> Ideas welcome.
>
>
> Thanks
>
>

-- 
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