[FIXED] How to make a log-file of an R-session which combines commands, results and warnings/messages/errors from the R-console

Issue

I would like to produce a log-file which keeps track of all commands (stdin), results (stdout) and errors/warnings/messages (stderr) in the R console.

I am aware that there are a lot of logging-packages and I tried several like TeachingDemos (seems to ignore stderr completely) or R2HTML (seems to ignore messages), however, none of them seems to include everything from stderr.

Only knitr and markdown seem to be able to include everything into a single file. But using this workaround, I have to write R-scripts and I cannot freely write commands in the console.
Furthermore, I cannot include the knitr or markdown command in the same R-script (which is of course a minor problem).

Here is an example:

library(TeachingDemos)
library(R2HTML)    
library(TraMineR)

logdir <- "mylog.dir"

txtStart(file=paste(logdir,"test.txt", sep=""), commands=TRUE, 
         results=TRUE, append=FALSE)
HTMLStart(outdir = logdir, file = "test", echo=TRUE, HTMLframe=FALSE)

## Messages, warnings and errors
message("Print this message.")
warning("Beware.")
"a" + 1
geterrmessage()

## Some example application with the TraMiner package 
## which uses messages frequently
data(mvad)
mvad.seq <- seqdef(mvad[, 17:86])
mvad.ham <- seqdist(mvad.seq, method="HAM")

txtStop()
HTMLStop()

Solution

If you are running R from a Unix/Linux/Mac/etc. terminal, you can do:

R | tee mydir/mylog.txt

On windows, you can run the script in

R CMD BATCH yourscript.R

and your result will appear in the same folder as yourscript.out

Answered By - flodel

Answer Checked By - Robin (PHPFixing Admin)