[R] equivalent of R CMD BATCH --vanilla for those who can't do anything non-GUI?

[Greg Snow]

You could have them spawn a vanilla R session using system instead of
the command line:

system('R CMD BATH --vanilla foo.R')

Or you could use the local argument to source to evaluate in a new
environment that does not inherit from the global environment:

source('foo.R', local=new.env(parent=parent.env(.GlobalEnv)))

this will prevent the code seeing anything in the global environment,
but it could still use functions/objects from any loaded packages.

On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 3:00 PM, Charles Geyer <charlie at stat.umn.edu> wrote:
> For a Google Group about aster models, I want to say that people wanting
> help are best advised to provide an example that works as
>
> R CMD BATCH --vanilla foo.R
>
> but I realize that many R users have zero idea of how to start R in any way
> other than clicking on an icon.  Is there a way to start up the standard
> mac and windows GUIs or Rstudio with no loaded saved global environment?
> (Without making it impossible to go back to what they were doing before?)
>
> Is there a way to make the source function do the job (ignore everything in
> the global environment)?
>
> What do you tell users about how to make an example that doesn't assume
> there is huge amounts of crap that the user doesn't even remember what it
> is that is involved?
>
> Do I just have to explain the command line to all the GUI fans?
>
> --
> Charles Geyer
> Professor, School of Statistics
> University of Minnesota
> charlie at stat.umn.edu
>
>         [[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.



-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
538280 at gmail.com