[R] session logging

[Marc Schwartz]

Jacob,

As far as I am aware, the OSX GUI has no logging/transcript feature  
per se, short of saving the console output to an external file.

The history file will, as you note, only contain the commands entered  
at the R prompt, not the additional output.

One of the solutions would be to use an external editor, which  
supports running an R session in such a fashion as to have the console  
output directed to a buffer or frame within the editor, which then  
itself can just be saved to a file.

There are a fair number of such options, but ESS (Emacs Speaks  
Statistics) is common and the one that I have used for a number of  
years, on Windows, then Linux and now OSX. ESS allows you to run an R  
session within Emacs and thus be able to save the entire R buffer to a  
file for future reference. Thus, you can have a complete transcript of  
the session.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz



On Aug 3, 2009, at 3:38 PM, Jacob Wegelin wrote:

> Maybe I'm missing something in the history help file. I read it and
> subsequently tried
>
>> savehistory("trythis.txt")
>
> but the resulting file does not contain the text that scrolled past
> the console. It contains only a few uninteresting timestamps. Is
> there some more useful application of history() or savehistory()?
>
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 4:09 PM, roger koenker <rkoenker at uiuc.edu>  
> wrote:
>
>> have you read
>>
>>       ?history
>>
>>
>> url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger            Roger Koenker
>> email    rkoenker at uiuc.edu            Department of Economics
>> vox:     217-333-4558                University of Illinois
>> fax:       217-244-6678                Urbana, IL 61801
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Aug 3, 2009, at 3:01 PM, Jacob Wegelin wrote:
>>
>> Consider all the text that one sees on the console during an R  
>> session.
>>>
>>> Is there a way, within R, that all this text--i.e., both the  
>>> "output" and
>>> the "messages"--can be automatically copied to a single file, in  
>>> addition
>>> to
>>> its being visible on the console?
>>>
>>> If I remember to save the console to a file at the end of my R  
>>> session,
>>> that
>>> does it. But
>>>
>>> (1) That requires pointing and clicking--can it be automated as a  
>>> text
>>> command?
>>>
>>> (2) It would be nice to issue the text command at the start of the R
>>> session, such as "log this entire session in mylog.txt, append",  
>>> to ensure
>>> that the session is logged whether I remember to save the console  
>>> or not.
>>>
>>> As far as I can tell,
>>>
>>> sink(file="mylog.txt")
>>>
>>> will hide the output from me and put it into mylog.txt. But it  
>>> still shows
>>> me the error messages.
>>>
>>> An attempt to put the output and messages into separate files  
>>> returns an
>>> error:
>>>
>>> sink("junkout.txt", type="output")
>>>> sink("junkmsg.txt", type="message")
>>>>
>>> Error in sink("junkmsg.txt", type = "message") :
>>> 'file' must be NULL or an already open connection
>>>
>>> and at any rate I'd like both messages in the same file, just like  
>>> on the
>>> console.
>>>
>>> People who run R at the unix command line apparently use the unix  
>>> command
>>> -script-. But I mean something that will work within R,
>>> platform-independent.
>>>
>>> A 2003 post to R-help suggests savehistory(), but this does *not*  
>>> save the
>>> console; I tried it just now. Another post from the same thread  
>>> suggests
>>> using emacs. But that is not platform-independent.
>>>
>>> The existence of the 2003 thread suggests that this issue comes up
>>> periodically. Was it a deliberate design decision not to make logs
>>> available, in contrast to the way logging works in Stata?
>>>
>>> I use the Rgui on a MacBook Pro:
>>>
>>> sessionInfo()
>>>>
>>> R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22)
>>> i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
>>>
>>> locale:
>>> en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>>>
>>> attached base packages:
>>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>>>
>>> other attached packages:
>>> [1] lme4_0.999375-28   Matrix_0.999375-21 lattice_0.17-17
>>> foreign_0.8-29
>>>
>>> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
>>> [1] boot_1.2-34 grid_2.8.1
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks for any insights.
>>>
>>> Jacob A. Wegelin
>>> Assistant Professor
>>> Department of Biostatistics
>>> Virginia Commonwealth University
>>> 730 East Broad Street Room 3006
>>> P. O. Box 980032
>>> Richmond VA 23298-0032
>>> U.S.A.
>>> E-mail: jwegelin at vcu.edu
>>> URL: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jwegelin
>>>
>>>       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>>
>>
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.