R-devel,
R is great, and in fact so great that I have whished to use it as a proper Unix filter ever since I started using it. Just like octave, perl, bash, etc.
Even though I could only find one message in the R-mailing lists, I can't imagine nobody else would want to be able to say on a nice bash command line:
$ cat data-file | some-process | R-script | another-process > file.out
specifically for (live generated, multiple) large data files and complicated calculations in the R-script.
So I wrote a set of wrapper scripts/programs. From the terse README:
---
`Rf' allows unix script programmers to use the statistics program `R'
as a proper unix filter. `R' is IMHO a great program, which can do
much more than only statistics, for instance, it has great graphics
output.
A big disadvantage is, however, that it seems inherently an interactive program, and can therefor not be used as a proper unix filter. More specifically, it cannot read data from stdin. It wants the script input in stdin.
In order to circumvent this problem, the Rf package comes with two utilities:
r-as-filter: a (bash) script doing most of the work Rf: a c-wrapper script that calls r-as-filter in a `sh-bang' context.
Basically, Rf allows you to write a little sh-bang script (included in this distribution as file `mean'):
===start of file==== #!/usr/local/bin/Rf
x <- scan(.stdin, quiet=T) cat (mean(x))
===end of file===
This example script reads number in from stdin (the R character variable `.stdin') and prints the average on standard out. Thus, one could say on the command line:
$ seq 10 | mean
and the average of the numbers 1 through 10 will be calculated (5.5).
---
The very first version of the package can be found at
http://speech.tm.tno.nl/r/rf-0.1.tar.gz
Of course, It would be a lot better if somehow R could include this functionality itself. But what do you think of this?
---david
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