Consider all the text that one sees on the console during an R session. Is there a way, within R, that all this text--i.e., both the "output" and the "messages"--can be automatically copied to a single file, in addition to its being visible on the console?
If I remember to save the console to a file at the end of my R session, that does it. But (1) That requires pointing and clicking--can it be automated as a text command? (2) It would be nice to issue the text command at the start of the R session, such as "log this entire session in mylog.txt, append", to ensure that the session is logged whether I remember to save the console or not. As far as I can tell, sink(file="mylog.txt") will hide the output from me and put it into mylog.txt. But it still shows me the error messages. An attempt to put the output and messages into separate files returns an error: > sink("junkout.txt", type="output") > sink("junkmsg.txt", type="message") Error in sink("junkmsg.txt", type = "message") : 'file' must be NULL or an already open connection and at any rate I'd like both messages in the same file, just like on the console. People who run R at the unix command line apparently use the unix command -script-. But I mean something that will work within R, platform-independent. A 2003 post to R-help suggests savehistory(), but this does *not* save the console; I tried it just now. Another post from the same thread suggests using emacs. But that is not platform-independent. The existence of the 2003 thread suggests that this issue comes up periodically. Was it a deliberate design decision not to make logs available, in contrast to the way logging works in Stata? I use the Rgui on a MacBook Pro: > sessionInfo() R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22) i386-apple-darwin8.11.1 locale: en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8 attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base other attached packages: [1] lme4_0.999375-28 Matrix_0.999375-21 lattice_0.17-17 foreign_0.8-29 loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] boot_1.2-34 grid_2.8.1 Thanks for any insights. Jacob A. Wegelin Assistant Professor Department of Biostatistics Virginia Commonwealth University 730 East Broad Street Room 3006 P. O. Box 980032 Richmond VA 23298-0032 U.S.A. E-mail: jwege...@vcu.edu URL: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jwegelin [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@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.