[R] Several simple but hard tasks to do with R

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 20 Aug 2009, Ottorino-Luca Pantani wrote:

> Rakknar ha scritto:
>>  1. Make a log. I've been using Stata and there i have a great tool to
>> register what the program do: the log file, wich it's a simple .txt file
>> where Stata writes every output it makes (not graphics of course). When I
>> wanted to make the same thing with R I started to use the function sink()
>> but it only register the results of the commands (summaries for example) and
>> not the commands itself, witch it's really uncomfortable because it's harder
>> to find out to witch command that results come from.
>> 
>>   
> A possible workaround could be:
>
> sink("ouputfile.txt")
> as.character("rnorm(5, mean = 0, sd = 1)")
> rnorm(5, mean = 0, sd = 1)
> sink()
>
> I know, it is not elegant, and a bit repetitive, but it could help.

This is why sink() has the split=TRUE option, which logs output to a connection and sends it to the screen.
The R
    sink("analysis.log",split=TRUE)
is almost identical to the Stata
    log using analysis.log

with sink() to close the log and flush to disk at the end of the session.

        -thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle