Rconsole wishlist
The problem is that the commands history is GUI-specific (there are four mechanisms, readline on Unix, one for the GUI MacOS X (I believe), one for RGui and one for rterm. And we will have to cope with both GNU and BSD readline shortly). We try to keep them consistent, and that means a lowest-common denominator approach. History is *not* intended to be a `command log' but a way to retrieve recentish commands, and the console buffer is just that, a buffer. They are implemented for fast access backwards and so not really appropriate for large logs. If you want a session log, look at 'split' option to sink(). With the advent of multibyte characters (supported in R as from 2.1.0) we need to redesign some of this (rterm's command line will not support such locales for 2.1.0). It should be possible to make the default R_HISTSIZE unlimited. The console buffer is less clear: how do you want to be warned? This could happen in the middle of a single print() command: it could even happen that a single line of output exceeds the buffer size. Finally: R-devel is for R development issues, so if people want to pursue this, please move there. (I am trying to be non-technical in this reply, and probably not succeeding.)
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen wrote:
Duncan Mackay wrote:
Sorry, yes, Rgui under WinXP (SP2). But while Windows date stamps the history file
file.info(".Rhistory")
size isdir mode mtime ctime
.Rhistory 5377 FALSE 666 2005-03-04 10:37:52 2005-03-04 10:37:52
atime
.Rhistory 2005-03-04 13:54:11
the problem is that there can be multiple sessions stored in .Rhistory and
the session dates aren't stored there. Moreover, it seems to me that the
history buffer can also overflow without warning after long sessions or
many
repeated sessions and so that you can inadvertently lose parts of your
command log.
Yes. But you can define an environment variable R_HISTSIZE (or some similar name, do a R site search to find. Not defined on my machine now. That should really be in the help file for savehistory()) to avoid the problem.
(Is this right, anyone?) Perhaps it would be preferable for R to save each session's command history in a separate history file, along the lines of
NO. it is better to have just one file as now. Kjetil
.Last <- function() {
savefilename <- paste("Rhistory",date())
savefilename <- gsub(" ","_",savefilename)
savefilename <- gsub(":",".",savefilename)
savefilename <- paste(savefilename,".txt",sep="")
if(interactive()) try(savehistory(savefilename))
cat("Current history saved in file: ",savefilename,"\n")
}
but this doesn't address any overflow issues.
Duncan
-----Original Message-----
From: Liaw, Andy [mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com] Sent: Friday, 4 March 2005
11:14 AM
To: 'Duncan Mackay'; R-news
Subject: RE: [R] Rconsole wishlist
I'm guessing you're talking about Rgui on Windows, but please don't leave
us
guessing.
If you run R under Ess/(X)Emacs, you have the entire session that can be
saved in a (transcript) file.
Does your OS not put date stamps on file?
file.info(".Rhistory")
size isdir mode mtime ctime
.Rhistory 1025 FALSE 666 2005-03-03 19:27:31 2004-08-13 10:45:09
atime
.Rhistory 2005-03-03 19:27:31
Andy
From: Duncan Mackay Hi all, Wouldn't it be nice (??!!) if R automatically issued a warning message when the R console buffer was about to fill so that you could save all your output into a text file? (I know about sink(), but I think it would be good to have an easier mechanism to save a complete record of messages and function output). And on a similar vein, wouldn't it also be nice if R automatically entered a date stamp into the history file?? Duncan ***************************************** Dr. Duncan Mackay School of Biological Sciences Flinders University GPO Box 2100 Adelaide S.A. 5001 AUSTRALIA Ph (08) 8201 2627 FAX (08) 8201 3015
http://www.scieng.flinders.edu.au/biology/people/mackay_d/index.html [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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