On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Erik Iverson <eriki@ccbr.umn.edu>  wrote:
> On 07/15/2010 07:10 PM, James wrote:
>> I'm completely new to R, and I'd like to do something like this:
>>     >  x=c(1,2,3)
>>     >  plot(x,x)
>> At this point, R creates a file "Rplots.pdf", since the default device is
>> PDF and the default filename is "Rplots.pdf".
>
> Since you're completely new to R, I might ask what OS you're using, and if
you're using R interactively?  If you are using R interactively, the default
device would probably create a new 'window' to display the graphic in.  If
you're running in batch mode, then pdf is the default.

Sorry for the lack of details.  I'm running R non-interactively (so the
default device is the "pdf" one), and I'm running on linux.

> I guess you can probably just write your own wrapper function and use that
as the device name.
> Try:
> mypng <- function(filename = "mydefault.png", ...) {
>   png(filename, ...)
> }
> options(device = "mypng")
> I did not test any of this, but I hope it works.

That definitely is an option, and if I can't figure out a way to change the
default then I might go with a wrapper function like that.

My goal is to make sure that I can choose the default name for any output
images.  In a normal script, you can just start plotting things (like in my
example) without creating a device or setting the graphics driver first.  It
just uses the default.  I can change the default device, but my goal is also
to change the default filename as well.

So instead of:

    > mypng()
    > x=c(1,2,3)
    > plot(x,x)

I can just do:

    > x=c(1,2,3)
    > plot(x,x)

Thanks for the help so far!
-James

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