[R] Pasting a large chunk of R code in terminals

Marc Schwartz
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 15:51:35 -0000

> On Oct 29, 2015, at 10:43 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at me.com>
wrote:
>
>
>> On Oct 29, 2015, at 10:16 AM, Victor Tian <tianxu03 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> Often times, I would run R in the terminal when the task is
computationally
>> intensive and a nice-looking UI is less desired.
>>
>> However, pasting a large chunk of code into the terminal often times
ends
>> up being messed up. In Python, the same problem would happen, however,
>> iPython provides a small functionality called magic word such as %paste
>> that can help paste the code neatly into the terminal.
>>
>> I'm wondering if there's a similar functionality in R.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> --
>> *Xu Tian*
>
>
> Rather than pasting a large amount of code into the terminal, put the code
into a text file (e.g. MyCode.R) and use ?source i your terminal session, to
read in the file to then be parsed and run.
>


BTW, another alternative is to run 'R CMD BATCH MyCode.R' from the CLI
(Linux and OS X).

If you are on Windows, I believe that would be:

  R.exe CMD BATCH MyCode.R

possibly having to specify the $PATH to R.exe.

See ?BATCH for additional information and Appendix B in An Introduction to R:

  https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-intro.html#Invoking-R

Regards,

Marc