Inclusion of a countdown tool of remaining calculation time possible?

2012/9/21 jennifer.moeller-gulland at de.pwc.com
<jennifer.moeller-gulland at de.pwc.com>:

Dear All,

We are currently working with very large datasets which even in R require
a lot of calculation time. Is there an option of including a function/
tool or something alike which shows the remaining time of calculation?
Just to see whether there is any progress or whether anything has crashed
and to get a feeling whether we have to wait for 5 min or 30min...

I wrote a little stopwatch function that ticks elapsed time for an
expression, you can find it here:

http://geospaced.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/stopwatch-in-r.html

but it has no way of knowing how long your process is going to take.

If you have something like a loop from 1:N you can do progress bars -
assorted ones are provided by the packages utils, tcltk, R.utils and
plyr - install them and do ??progress for a list of functions.

Barry