similar to: request to add argv[0]

dear R group: I have the probably fairly common problem that I would like to have one code.R file do different things if it is invoked from a symbolic link, which should be easy to uncover. $ ln -s code.R code-0.R $ ln -s code.R code-1.R $ R CMD BATCH code-1.R what needs to be in code-1.R to put code-1.r into a character vector? help appreciated. regards, /ivo welch PS : I read

Dear R experts: I am a bit stymied by how the argument picking-off works in R batch file usage. $ cat commandArgs.R cat(" Command Line Arguments were ", commandArgs(), "\n"); $ /usr/bin/R CMD BATCH commandArgs.R --args 1 2 3 $ /usr/bin/R --args 1 CMD BATCH commandArgs.R ... I am now getting into interactive mode ?! I guess it really is skipping the rest of the command line

dear R experts--- I am experimenting with multicore processing, so far with pretty disappointing results. Here is my simple example: A <- 100000 randvalues <- abs(rnorm(A)) minfn <- function( x, i ) { log(abs(x))+x^3+i/A+randvalues[i] } ?## an arbitrary function ARGV <- commandArgs(trailingOnly=TRUE) if (ARGV[1] == "do-onecore") { ?library(foreach) ?discard <-

dear R wizards: an operation I execute often is the deletion of all observations (in a matrix or data set) that have at least one NA. (I now need this operation for kde2d, because its internal quantile call complains; could this be considered a buglet?) usually, my data sets are small enough for speed not to matter, and there I do not care whether my method is pretty inefficient (ok, I

dear R wizards: I am trying to determine how to determine (no further recursion) where a built-in function is defined. In particular, I have decided I am going to add sd() to the existing basic summary function, rather than try to rewrite my own summary() function from scratch. So, I just installed R-2.2.1 (via gentoo; eventually I will figure out how to get atlas/sse/sse2 working on amd64,

dear R experts---now I have a case where I want to estimate very large regression models with many fixed effects---not just the mean type, but cross-fixed effects---years, months, locations, firms. Many millions of observations, a few thousand variables (most of these variables are interaction fixed effects). could someone please point me to packages, if any, that would help me estimate such

Dear R wizards: I am playing (and struggling) with the example in the constrOptim function. simple example. let's say I want to constrain my variables to be within -1 and 1. I believe I want a whole lot of constraints where ci is -1 and ui is either -1 or 1. That is, I have 2*N constraints. Should the following work? N=10 x= rep(1:N) ci= rep(-1, 2*N) ui= c(rep(1, N), rep(-1, N))

Dear R wizards: is there a clean way to assign to elements in a list? what I would like to do, in pseudo R+perl notation is f <- function(a,b) list(a+b,a-b) (c,d) <- f(1,2) and have c be assigned 1+2 and d be assigned 1-2. right now, I use the clunky x <- f(1,2) c <- x[[1]] d <- x[[2]] rm(x) which seems awful. is there a nicer syntax? regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch

dear R experts---I am using the coef() function to pick off the coefficients from an lm() object. alas, I also need the standard errors and I need them fast. I know I can do a "summary()" on the object and pick them off this way, but this computes other stuff I do not need. Or, I can compute (X' X)^(-1) s^2 myself. Has someone written a fast se() function? incidentally, I think

this is not an important question, but I wonder why lm returns an error, and whether this can be shut off. it would seem to me that returning NA's would make more sense in some cases---after all, the problem is clearly that coefficients cannot be computed. I know that I can trap the lm.fit() error---although I have always found this to be quite inconvenient---and this is easy if I have only

hi: where would I find facilities to draw circles, ovals, and semicircles? (or should I construct them myself using curve?) regards, /ivo

As an end-user, I wonder about Revolution R. Is the relationship between Revolution R and the R community at-large a positive one? Do the former contribute to the development efforts of the latter? Is there a competitive aspect? is their forum competitive with r-help? any other thoughts? (most of all, I simply hope that they help some of the many helpful experts on this forum, who have

dear R wizards:? I am wrestling with reshape.? I have a long data set that I want to convert into a wide data set, in which rows are firms and columns are years. > summary(rin) firm fyear sim1 Min. :1004.00 Min. :1964.0 Min. : -1.00000 1st Qu.:1010.00 1st Qu.:1979.0 1st Qu.: -0.14334 Median :1016.00 Median :1986.0 Median : 0.00116 Mean

dear R wizards: here is the strange question for the day. It seems to me that nrow() is very slow. Let me explain what I mean: ds= data.frame( NA, x=rnorm(10000) ) ## a sample data set > system.time( { for (i in 1:10000) NA } ) ## doing nothing takes virtually no time user system elapsed 0.000 0.000 0.001 ## this is something that should take time; we need to add 10,000

dear readers---I struggled with how to do nice fixed-effects regressions in large economic samples for a while. Eventually, I realized that nlme is not really what I needed (too complex), and all I really wanted is the plm package. so, I thought I would share a quick example. ################ sample code to show fixed-effects models? in R # create a sample panel data set with firms and years

Dear R wizards: This must have an obvious solution, but I am stumped. I can run a linear regression giving a matrix as the independent set of variables, but if I give a data frame (which I would like to give, because it should tell the linear model the names of the variables), R does not like it. An example is: N=20; y= rnorm(N); x.m <- (matrix( nrow=N, ncol=2 )); x.m[,1]=rnorm(N);

Dear R experts--- Has anyone written parallel versions of "by" (i.e., mcby) and "ave" (i.e. mcave) ? I did ask a question like this a year ago, and then the answer was no. for those who are googling the group for the answer to this question, in the meantime, the poor man's version of "by" is mclapply( split( ds, factor ), FUN ) I don't know the poor

Dear R Wizards---is it possible to get R to show its current call stack (sys.calls()) upon an error abort? I don't use ESS for execution, and it is often not obvious how to locate how I triggered an error in an R internal function. Seeing the call stack would make this easier. (right now, I sprinkle "cat" statements everywhere, just to locate the line where the error appears.) Of

is it possible to throw a stop() that is so hard that it will escape even tryCatch? /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at gmail.com)

dear R experts---I am struggling with the requirements to prepare my files for my printers. I am printing in 2/2 format, which means cyan and black for me, which they take from my color-separated pdf files. R comes into play, because it produces all the figures that are embedded in my book (pdflatex). now, TeX has no problems producing CMYK files. However, R produces RGB files (for