[R] how to save the R script itself into a rData file?

[Greg Snow]

You could use the saveHistory command to save the history of commands that you have written to a file, then read that into a variable using the scan function, then do the save or save.image to save everything.

A different approach would be to save transcripts of your session that would show the commands run and the output created, on option for doing this is to run R inside of ESS/emacs, another option is the txtStart function in the TeachingDemos package.

You could also use the addTaskCallback function to add a task callback that adds each command (well the successful ones, errors don't trigger the callbacks) to a text vector, then this text vector would be saved in .Rdata when doing save.image()


-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Michael
Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2012 5:25 PM
To: r-help
Subject: [R] how to save the R script itself into a rData file?

Hi all,

As a part of work flow, I do a lot of experiments and save all my results
into rData file...

i.e. at the end of all my experiments, I do
"save.image("experiment_name_with_series_number.rData")"...

However, some times even with the rData files, I cannot remember the
context where these data files were generated.

Of course, I can make the R data file names and the R script file names the
same, so that whenever I see a data file, I will be able to track down to
how the result file was generated.

This is fine. But sometimes a bunch of different results rData files were
generated simply from varying a parameter in the same R script file.

It's kind of messy to save different R script files with different names
when only parameters are different, and not to say if there are a bunch of
parameters that need to be put into file names...

Lets say I changed the parameters x to 0.123, y to -0.456, z to -999.99

Then I have to save the R script file as
"Experiment_001_x=0.123_y=-0.456_z=-999.99.r"

and the result file as "Experiment_001_x=0.123_y=-0.456_z=-999.99.rData"

...

This is kind of messy, isn't it?

Is there a way to save the whole script file (i.e. the context where the
data file is generated) into the rData file? It cannot be the file location
and/or file name of the R script file; it needs to be the whole content of
the file... to prevent the parameters change .. i.e. the same R script file
but with different combinations of parameters...

How to do that?

Any good tricks?

Thanks a lot!

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