I don't think it would be a good idea to make R try to guess whether it really should use the second argument after BATCH as an output file. This type of complication can have unintended and unanticipated side effects -- "Do What I Mean" programming tools have not been a huge success because it's impossible to always accurately guess what a person means. I don't know about other people, but I use scripts to generate scripts all the time (for generating commands to run experiments with different sets of parameters).
-- Tony Plate
At Tuesday 03:32 PM 11/16/2004, Douglas Grove wrote:
Hi,
I'm having a problem (of my own creation) with BATCH.
The current problem (for me): ---------------------------- I'm sloppy. I work on *nux systems and will type e.g. "R CMD BATCH a*R out" to avoid typing the full name of some R script of mine. However, sometimes I'm overly sloppy and there are multiple files that match "a*R", so "a*R" turns into e.g. "aa.R ab.R", and the arguments to BATCH will be "aa.R ab.R out". BATCH will use aa.R as the input file and ab.R as the output file, leading to my script ab.R being overwritten. I then have to plead to my sysadm to restore the file for me.
I've done this often enough that I need to make a modification to BATCH, and was wondering if anything can be done about this that can be used generally. In other words, is there a fix to my problem that would be usable in general and won't mess up something else?
Solutions: ----------- A simple solution to this problem is to print a message and exit when more than 2 arguments are found. While I don't know why offhand, there's probably a reason why people would like to pass extra arguments and have them ignored by BATCH. If so, this won't work in general.
Something more intelligent would be to examine the first two arguments and if they both end in .R then issue a message and exit. I would think create fewer problems. I don't think many people are using R scripts to create other R scripts, and if they are they can always rename them after they create them.
I'm just going to go for the simple solution for now, but wanted to toss this issue out in case it might be something that could be integrated into the official BATCH script.
Thanks,
Doug Grove Statistical Research Associate Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Seattle, WA
______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
