[Rd] R --interactive and readline() creates infinite loop

[Jon Clayden]

Dear all,

I have asked before, in R-help [1], about a way to create an  
interactive session in which commands are taken from a file or  
standard input - like R CMD BATCH but additionally allowing user input  
- but there was no response to that question, and the workarounds that  
I have found (using "expect", creating a temporary .Rprofile) are ugly  
and problematic.

With the appearance of the --interactive flag in R 2.7.0 I thought  
this might become possible, but it not only does not behave as I would  
expect, it appears to go into an infinite loop, and uses 100% CPU  
until killed.

$ echo 'print(readline("Input:"))' | R --no-save --quiet
 > print(readline("Input:"))
Input:[1] ""
 >
[no interactivity]

$ echo 'print(readline("Input:"))' | R --no-save --quiet --interactive
[no response at all]

This behaviour remains in the latest alphas of R 2.8.0. My platform is  
Mac OS X.5.5 on Intel Core 2 Duo.

I assume, given this outcome, that this is not the intended use of -- 
interactive, but I still wonder if there is any way to achieve an  
interactive session based on a predefined set of commands without  
writing a completely new front-end (overkill, surely?).

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Regards,
Jon

[1] http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/117412.html


--
Jonathan D. Clayden, Ph.D.
Research Fellow
Radiology and Physics Unit
UCL Institute of Child Health
30 Guilford Street
LONDON  WC1N 1EH
United Kingdom

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