[R] User input when running R code in batch mode

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Kaushik Krishnan
<kaushik.s.krishnan at gmail.com> wrote:

> $ r --vanilla < test.r
>> a <- scan(what='character',n=1); a
> 1: Read 0 items
> character(0)
> ----
> Now it's not working.

 Assuming this is a unix environment, the syntax '< test.r' means 'my
standard input stream is the file test.r'. That's not what you want.
Give R the file name as an argument and let the standard input stream
remain user input:

$ r --vanilla  test.r
1: hello
Read 1 item
[1] "hello"

 Note that this is 'r' and not 'R'. For me this comes from the
'littler' package in Ubuntu Linux. The same thing with 'R' doesn't
work:

$ R --vanilla  test.r
ARGUMENT 'test.r' __ignored__
[banner]
 >  [the R prompt appears]

 Maybe there's a way of doing this with big R, but I think littler is
designed for this kind of thing.

> Is there any way to make R stop for the user to enter values when
> running in batch mode either by changing the way I invoke scan() or
> readLines() or by using any other function?

 An alternative is to use the tcltk package to make a dialog for user input.

Barry