[R] Creating a custom connection to read from multiple files

[Tomas Kalibera]

Dear Prof Ripley,

thanks for your suggestions, it's very nice one can create custom 
connections directly in R and I think it is what I need just now.

> However, what is wrong with reading a file at a time and combining the 
> results in R using rbind?
>
Well, the problem is performance. If I concatenate all those files, they 
have around 8MB, can grow to tens of MBs in near future.

Both concatenating and reading from a single file by scan takes 5 
seconds (which is almost OK).

However, reading individual files by read.table and rbinding one by one 
( samples=rbind(samples, newSamples ) takes minutes. The same is when I 
concatenate lists manually. Scan does not help significantly. I guess 
there is some overhead in detecting dimensions of objects in rbind (?) 
or re-allocation or copying data ?

Best regards,

Tomas Kalibera