Hi, Prof. Ripley,

Thanks for the reply. Mostly I want to capture output as it is written to the stream. For example, I quite often do the following to view the progress of a log file from a computationally intensive script.

1. Open a console and type:

Rscript script.R >& script.log

which directs both stdout and stderr to "script.log"

2. Open another console and type:

tail -f script.log

This way I get both the script's log file and its current progress.

I guess my question is: Is there a way to accomplish the "tail -f" command in R?

Thanks,

--sundar

Prof Brian Ripley said the following on 11/20/2008 11:43 PM:
I am not sure what the issue is here. Do you want to capture both stderr and stdout (use 2>1 in the command with an sh-like shell), or is the
problem that you don't get immediate output?

The latter is a Perl issue: you need to circumvent output buffering.
See e.g

http://perl.plover.com/FAQs/Buffering.html

Sundar Dorai-Raj wrote:
Hi,

I have an application in perl that prints some output to either stderr or stdout.

Here's an example:

# tmp.pl
print STDERR "starting iterator\n";
for(my $i = 0; $i < 1000000; $i++) {
  print $i . "\n";
}

# tmp.R
con <- pipe("perl tmp.pl")
r <- readLines(con, n = -1)
close(con)

However, the second line stalls until the perl for-loop finishes. What I would like is to process each line as it comes. E.g. something like:

while(TRUE) {
  r <- readLines(con, n = 1) # read one line
  if(r == "10000") print(r)
  if(length(r) == 0) break
}

Of course, this won't work since I'm not calling readLines appropriately. Answers must work on Windows but may include cygwin utilities if necessary. Any advice would be appreciated. Version info at the end if it matters.

Thanks, --sundar


 > version
               _
platform       i386-pc-mingw32
arch           i386
os             mingw32
system         i386, mingw32
status
major          2
minor          8.0
year           2008
month          10
day            20
svn rev        46754
language       R
version.string R version 2.8.0 (2008-10-20)

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