R help - Apr 2003 - system()

I am new to R but have used Splus for many years.  When I create many 
graphics in sequence in Splus/Linux, each time that I complete a 
page, I send a message to my command line interface using the 
following function:

FOOT <- function(PAGENO,TEXT)
         {
         mtext(outer=T, TEXT, side=1)
         unix("cat", c(paste("Finished with page",
PAGENO)),FALSE, FALSE)
         }
PAGENO <- PAGENO + 1
FOOT(PAGENO,"Text")

In R, the corresponding function appears to be "system()".  I
don't
see how I can pass the PAGENO argument to "cat" in R.

Any advice?

-- 


Dennis M. Fisher, MD
The "P Less Than" Company
Toll-free phone:	1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
Fax:		1-415 564-2220
Email:		fisher at PLessThan.com
Web:		www.PLessThan.com

1) You didn't need to use unix() in S-PLUS.  Just

    cat("Finished with page", PAGENO, "\n")

which also works in R.

2) In R you could use

    system(paste("echo", "Finished with page", PAGENO))

this being a more standard way to produce output in Unix that creating a 
file and piping it to cat: but you could do that if you wanted to.
(That's exactly what unix(input="foo") does: list it to see.)

On Fri, 11 Apr 2003, Dennis Fisher wrote:
> I am new to R but have used Splus for many years.  When I create many 
> graphics in sequence in Splus/Linux, each time that I complete a 
> page, I send a message to my command line interface using the 
> following function:
> 
> FOOT <- function(PAGENO,TEXT)
>          {
>          mtext(outer=T, TEXT, side=1)
>          unix("cat", c(paste("Finished with page",
PAGENO)),FALSE, FALSE)
>          }
> PAGENO <- PAGENO + 1
> FOOT(PAGENO,"Text")
> 
> In R, the corresponding function appears to be "system()".  I
don't
> see how I can pass the PAGENO argument to "cat" in R.
> 
> Any advice?
> 
> 
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595