writing R shell scripts?

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:

What you really want to do might be solved by write.table(), e.g.

x <- matrix(rnorm(25*2),c(25,2));
write.table(file=stdout(), x, row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE);

Thanks.  That does what I want.

There is one remaining problem for my "echo" method.  While write.table
seems to do the right thing for me, R seems to add an extra newline to the
output when it closes.  You can see that this produces exactly one newline
and nothing else:

# echo '' | R --slave --no-save | wc -c
      1

Is there any way to stop R from sending an extra newline?  It's funny
because normal running of R doesn't seem to terminate by sending a newline
to stdout.  Oops -- I just figured it out.  If I send "quit()", there is
no extra newline!  Examples that send no extra newline:

echo 'quit()' | R --slave --no-save

echo "x <- matrix(rnorm(25*2),c(25,2)); write.table(file=stdout(), x, row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE); quit()" | R --slave --no-save

I suppose we can live with that as it is.  Is this an intentional feature?