[R] R 2.5.1 - Rscript through tee

[François Pinard]

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]
>[François Pinard]

>>    #!/usr/bin/Rscript
>>    options(echo=TRUE)
>>    a <- 1
>>    Sys.sleep(3)
>>    a <- 2

>> If I execute "./pp.R" at the shell prompt, the output shows the 
>> timely progress of the script as expected.  If I use "./pp.R | tee 
>> OUT" instead, the output seems buffered and I see it all at once at 
>> the end.  [...] So, is there a way to tell R (or Rscript) that 
>> standard output should be unbuffered, even if it is not directly 
>> connected to a terminal?

> Use explicit print statements, e.g.  print(a <- 1)

Yes, I noticed that "print" statements get written.  But I wanted the 
mere "echo" trace of the execution of the script to be synchronous (as 
some statements take many seconds to compute, which I symbolically 
replaced by "Sys.sleep" above).

> Littler5D actually won't show anything unless you explicitly call 
> cat() or print(), but then it does [...]

It shares the limitation of Rscript, then.

> Littler is an 'all-in' binary and starts and runs demonstrably faster 
> than Rscript.

I'm not familiar with Littler.  Speedwise, Rscript is OK for me so far, 
as most time is spent within R computations, not much in language 
compilation or script interpretation.

> [...] the rather petty refusal of Rscript's main author to a least 
> give a reference to littler in Rscript's documentation, let alone 
> credit as 'we were there first', [...]

I've long been in academic circles (and elsewhere too), so I'm familiar 
with the need of recognizing authorship and people's works.  However, 
perusing R mailing list archives, and following actual list contents, 
I'm sometimes surprised, and even a bit annoyed, by the recurrent starve 
for credit I observe.  Of course, maintainers and contributors much 
deserve our thanks and, without going into arguments about what is due 
to whom, I think contributors receive praise on average, would it be 
only by all the interest shown by the community.  However, it gets a bit 
muddy when maintainers or contributors show bad temper when not 
receiving the systematic credit they would like to read.

Cicero's friends were telling him how upset they felt that there was 
still no statute of Cicero on the public place.  Cicero replied that he 
much preferred to hear people saying "Why no Cicero statute yet?" than 
to hear people saying "Why the Cicero statute?".  A wise attitude! :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca