[R] Printing output in STDOUT

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 20 May 2008, Esmail Bonakdarian wrote:

> Edward Wijaya wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Currently the R script I have is executed with this command:
>> 
>> $ R CMD BATCH mycode.R
>> 
>> And the output is stored in mycode.Rout.
>> 
>> Is there a way I can issue command from shell (like above)
>> so that the output is printed to STDOUT?
>> 
>> It's  troublesome to open the "Rout" file every time to debug.
>
> Under a Unix system you could try to pipe the command into tail -f
>
> i.e.,
>
> $ R CMD BATCH mycode.R | tail -f
>
> That should display the file as it gets written.

Buffering may get in the way -- so 'gets written' may be much later than 
when it is output by R.

> I don't have access to a Unix system right now to give this a try
> but it should be a work around until someone who knows more about
> R can come up with an answer.

What is wrong with

R --vanilla < mycode.R

or variants like

R --no-save < mycode.R
R --no-save -f mycode.R

or even

Rscript mycode.R

?  R CMD BATCH is intended (unsurprisingly) for batch use of R.

> HTH
>
> Esmail

-- 
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