[R] session logging

Allan Engelhardt allane at cybaea.com
Tue Aug 4 21:24:09 CEST 2009


sink(..., type=c("output","message"), split=TRUE) at the beginning of 
your session should do it?

Jacob Wegelin wrote:
>
> Consider all the text that one sees on the console during an R session.
>
> Is there a way, within R, to make all this text--both the "output" and 
> the "messages"--automatically get copied to a single text file, in 
> addition to seeing it on the console?
>
> If I remember to save the console to a file at the end of my R 
> session, that does it. But
>
> (1) That requires pointing and clicking--can it be automated as a text 
> command?
>
> (2) It would be nice to issue the text command at the start of the R 
> session, such as "log this entire session in mylog.txt, append", if 
> this would ensure that the session is logged whether I remember to 
> save the console or not.
>
> As far as I can tell,
>
> sink(file="mylog.txt")
>
> will hide the output from me and put it into mylog.txt. But it still 
> shows me the error messages.
>
> An attempt to put the output and messages into separate files returns 
> an error:
>
>> sink("junkout.txt", type="output")
>> sink("junkmsg.txt", type="message")
> Error in sink("junkmsg.txt", type = "message") :
>   'file' must be NULL or an already open connection
>
> and at any rate I'd like both messages in the same file, just like on 
> the console.
>
> People who run R at the unix command line apparently use the unix 
> command -script-. But I mean something that will work within R, 
> platform-independent.
>
> A 2003 post to R-help suggests savehistory(), but this does *not* save 
> the console; I tried it just now. Another post from the same thread 
> suggests using emacs. But that is not platform-independent.
>
> The existence of the 2003 thread suggests that this issue comes up 
> periodically. Was it a deliberate design decision not to make logs 
> available, in contrast to the way logging works in Stata?
>
> I use the Rgui on a MacBook Pro:
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22) i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
>
> locale:
> en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> other attached packages:
> [1] lme4_0.999375-28   Matrix_0.999375-21 lattice_0.17-17
> foreign_0.8-29
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] boot_1.2-34 grid_2.8.1
>
>
> Thanks for any insights.
>
> Jacob A. Wegelin
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Biostatistics
> Virginia Commonwealth University
> 730 East Broad Street Room 3006
> P. O. Box 980032
> Richmond VA 23298-0032
> U.S.A. E-mail: jwegelin at vcu.edu URL: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jwegelin
>
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