Command-line arguments and --interactive
On Tue, 10 Nov 2009, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
--interactive tells R that there is a human producing the input stream, so it can ask questions and expect them to be answered. In your experiments with it, your input stream was the pipe holding the output of echo, and R got confused because that pipe wouldn't answer its question.
I see. That makes sense, and thank you.
Your problem is that you want an input stream that starts out from your fixed code and then switches to your shell's stdin.
Correct. Or, you might consider it an ability to add a command or two to the effective end of .Rprofile.
I think you can do that on some systems by saving your input to a file then concatenating it to stdin, e.g. something like this: echo '10*5; scan()' >test.R cat test.R - | R --interactive I don't know if there's a way to do this in one line, and I'd expect some oddities.
Creating a new file progammatically is difficult. Another solution, suggested by peterdc in the #R irc channel, was to run R itself and then use the system() command to complete the prior-to-launching-R task...that is the solution I'm going with, but thanks very much for your help! --Adam