rstudio - is it possible to run a code in the background
Question regarding RStudio. Suppose I am running a code in the console:
> code1()
assume that code1() prints nothing on the console, but code1() above takes an hour to complete. I want to work on something else while I wait for code1(). is it possible? Is there a function like runInBackground which I can use as follows
> runInBackground(code1())
> code2()
The alternatives are running two RStudios or writing a batch file that uses Rscript to run code1(), but I wanted to know if there is something easier that I can do without leaving the RStudio console. I tried to browse through R's help documentation but didn't come up with anything (or may be I didn't use the proper keywords).
Answer
The future package (I'm the author) provides this:
library("future")
plan(multisession)
future(code1())
code2()
FYI, if you use
plan(cluster, workers = c("n1", "n3", "remote.server.org"))
then the future expression is resolved on one of those machines. Using
plan(future.BatchJobs::batchjobs_slurm)
will cause it to be resolved via a Slurm job scheduler queue.
This question is closely related to Run asynchronous function in R