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: jwege...@vcu.edu
URL: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jwegelin
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