On 27/06/2014, 4:08 AM, Benjamin Tyner wrote:> Hi
>
> I know that subset() is not intended for use in programming. However I
> am still curious to learn why, in non-interactive mode, if I take away
> the quotes around 'bar'
>
> Rscript -e "foo <- list(bar = iris);
head(subset(foo$'bar',
> Species=='setosa'))"
> Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
> 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
> 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
> 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
> 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa
> 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa
> 6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosa
>
> then it results in an error:
>
> Rscript -e "foo <- list(bar = iris); head(subset(foo$bar,
> Species=='setosa'))"
> Error in subset.default(foo, Species == "setosa") :
> object 'Species' not found
> Calls: head -> subset -> subset.default
> Execution halted
>
> and also why this does not occur in interactive mode? My sessionInfo() is
>
> R Under development (unstable) (2014-06-26 r66043)
> Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)
>
> locale:
> [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
> [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
> [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
> [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
> [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
>
Try replacing "Rscript -e" with "echo" to see what your
shell is really
sending as a command to execute. I suspect it is treating $bar as a
shell variable (see the error message, it has disappeared).