[R] .Rprofile, date tagging history, loading packages

[Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)]

Dear R-Helpers,

I'm fiddling with my .Rprofile in Windows XP & R 2.7.0 Beta. I prefer to
manually save my workspace but automatically save my command history via
the .Rprofile. That is working fine once I found that "utils::" was
required before the loadhistory & savehistory functions. What I would
like to do is add a separator line with a date between the histories of
each session. Something like,

=====History for Sun Apr 13 09:43:50 2008

Is this possible? I have it print the date at startup, but that doesn't
appear as part of the history.

Also, I'm loading two packages at startup, which is working fine with
this code:

local({
   myOriginal <- getOption("defaultPackages")
   myAutoLoads <- c("Hmisc","ggplot2")
   myBoth <- c(myOriginal,myAutoLoads)
   options(defaultPackages = myBoth)
 })

But when reading AITR, I noticed it has a .Rprofile example that looks
much simpler. It just loads the one additional package without checking
the defaultPackages. Is this just as good? Does it even need to be in
the .First function definition, or could it simply be a command by
itself in .Rprofile?

.First <- function() {
options(prompt="$ ", continue="+\t") # $ is the prompt
options(digits=5, length=999) # custom numbers and printout
x11() # for graphics
par(pch = "+") # plotting character
source(file.path(Sys.getenv("HOME"), "R", "mystuff.R"))
# my personal functions
library(MASS) # attach a package
}

Thanks,
Bob

My whole .Rprofile:

#     Startup Settings

# Place any R commands below.

options(width=64, digits=5, show.signif.stars=TRUE)
set.seed(1234)
setwd("/myRfolder")
myPackages <- c("car","foreign","hexbin",
  "ggplot2","gmodels","gplots", "Hmisc",
  "lattice", "reshape","ggplot2","Rcmdr")
utils::loadhistory(file = "myCumulative.Rhistory")


# Load packages automatically below.

 local({
   myOriginal <- getOption("defaultPackages")

   # Edit next line to include your favorites.
   myAutoLoads <- c("Hmisc","ggplot2")
   myBoth <- c(myOriginal,myAutoLoads)
   options(defaultPackages = myBoth)
 })

# Things put here are done first.
.First <- function() 
  {
    cat("\n   Welcome to R!")
    cat("\n  " , paste(date()), "\n\n" )
  }


# Things put here are done last.
.Last <- function() 
  {
    graphics.off()
    cat("\n\n  myCumulative.Rhistory has been saved on " ,paste(date())
) 
    cat("\n\n  Goodbye!\n\n") 
    utils::savehistory(file="myCumulative.Rhistory")
  }

=========================================================
Bob Muenchen (pronounced Min'-chen), Manager 
Statistical Consulting Center
U of TN Office of Information Technology
200 Stokely Management Center, Knoxville, TN 37996-0520
Voice: (865) 974-5230 
FAX: (865) 974-4810
Email: muenchen at utk.edu
Web: http://oit.utk.edu/scc, 
News: http://listserv.utk.edu/archives/statnews.html
=========================================================