[R] cat() to STDERR

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sat, 21 Apr 2007, ivo welch wrote:

> I spoke to soon.  cat("hello", file=stderr()) does not "punch through"
> R CMD BATCH test.R.  Is there a way to have stderr() messages escape
> the log and go directly to the invoking terminal (i.e., under
> linux/unix, late-release gentoo).  Maybe this should require a
> different name than "BATCH", so as to not break scripts that rely on
> nothing escaping.  I find it very convenient in long scripts written
> in perl or C to have the ability to write "blips" to the terminal,
> too...

Well, R CMD BATCH sends STDERR to the file (the help does say

Description:

      Run R non-interactively with input from 'infile' and send output
      (stdout/stderr) to another file.

) but look at the script: in 2.4.1 Unix-alikes

cat ${in} | ${R_HOME}/bin/R ${opts} ${R_BATCH_OPTIONS} >${out} 2>&1

is the key part.  So

R --vanilla < infile > outfile

is likely to do what you want.

In 2.5.0 Rscript is even easier to use.



> sincerely,
>
> /ivo welch
>
>
> On 4/20/07, ivo welch <ivowel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> thank you, peter and brian.  I had not found the stderr() function.
>> (I had looked at the R Input/Output guide.)  This is great.  regards,
>> /ivo
>> 
>

-- 
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)
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