Managing R objects with 'make'
On Fri, 11 May 2001, Taylor, Z Todd wrote:
I frequently use Makefiles to manage routine data manipulations and repeated analyses where the "raw" data tend to change with time. With S/Splus, this has worked quite naturally, as long as I'm careful to use S object names that map directly to Unix/Linux filenames. For example, say I'm building a particular graphic (chart.ps) from a data.frame in S (mydata) that comes from an external data file (mydata.csv). The makefile snippet would look like: chart.ps: .Data/mydata mkchart.src Splus < mkchart.src > mkchart.log 2>&1 .Data/mydata: mydata.csv build_mydata.src Splus < build_mydata.src > build_mydata.log 2>&1 Of course, build_mydata.src would do a read.table on mydata.csv plus other necessary transformations. I'm looking for suggestions how I might achieve similar functionality using R. My work involves many other programs besides S, so I'm very reluctant to abandon the Makefile approach to use R. But it's not obvious to me that I can use 'make' to manage individual objects in R.
You *can* store individual objects or sets of objects in files in R, it
just doesn't happen automatically. If your object creation is done by
scripts it is easy to build in a save() command
Eg build_data.r
x<-read.table("xfile.dat")
y<-read.table("yfile.dat")
z<-somefunctionof(x,y)
save(x,y,z,file="xyz.rdata")
mkchart.R
load("xyz.rdata")
postscript("chart.ps")
plot(someobjectbasedon(x,y,z))
dev.off()
-thomas
Thomas Lumley Asst. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle
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