I think this is quoted out of context. I was referring to Duncan's post
which shows an example of piping R code.

On 9/26/06, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@(protected):
>
> On 26 September 2006 at 22:17, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> | The real problem is that one wants to pipe the data in, not the
> | R source. The idea is that one successively transforms the
> | data in successive elements of the pipeline.
>
> But that is what our filesize example does::
>
> | On 9/26/06, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch@(protected):
> | > On 9/26/2006 1:04 PM, Jeffrey Horner wrote:
> [...]
> | > >   But unlike bc(1), GNU R has a vast number of statistical
> | > >   functions. For example, we can quickly compute a summary() and show
> | > >   a stem-and-leaf plot for file sizes in a given directory via
> | > >
> | > >       $ ls -l /boot | awk '!/^total/ {print $5}' | \
> | > >          r -e 'fsizes <- as.integer(readLines());
> | > >            print(summary(fsizes)); stem(fsizes)'
> | > >         Min. 1st Qu. Median   Mean 3rd Qu.   Max.
> | > >          13   512 110100 486900 768400 4735000
> | > >       Loading required package: grDevices
> | > >
> | > >        The decimal point is 6 digit(s) to the right of the |
> | > >
> | > >        0 | 00000000000000000011112223
> | > >        0 | 5557778899
> | > >        1 | 112233
> | > >        1 | 5
> | > >        2 |
> | > >        2 |
> | > >        3 |
> | > >        3 |
> | > >        4 |
> | > >        4 | 7
>
> Data to be processed on stdin, command via -e 'some long expression'.
>
> To make it simpler, here is a somewhat useless example of r piping into r
> (which I've indented for readability):
>
> $ r -e 'set.seed(42); sapply(rnorm(5),function(x) cat(x,"\n"))' | \
>           r -e 'cat(sum(abs(as.numeric(readLines()))), "\n")'
> 3.335916
>
> Isn't that something where, to quote you, "one wants to pipe the data in, not
> the R source" ?
>
> Dirk
>
> --
> Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
>                                 -- Thomas A. Edison
>

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