How to keep an RGL plot on the screen when using Rscript?

Question

I have a very simple .r file:

library("rgl")
par(ask=TRUE)

x=c(0.44,0.45)
y=c(0.2, 0.3)
z=matrix(c(1,2,3,4),nrow=length(x))

persp3d(x,y,z)

When I open a cmd screen and navigate to my R installation and try

Rscript P:\pathtoscript\example.r

I see the persp3d graph flash up really quickly and then disappear, even though my .r file contains the par(ask=true) command.

So my question is, how can I keep it up and play around with it, without it going away before I'm done?

Thanks for your help.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 17 '16 at 14:19

I'm not aware of a more idiomatic way to do this type of thing, but you can just add Sys.sleep(large_number_of_seconds) to keep the R process alive. For example,

script.R

library("rgl")

x <- c(0.44, 0.45)
y <- c(0.2, 0.3)
z <- matrix(c(1,2,3,4),nrow = length(x))

persp3d(x,y,z)
Sys.sleep(100000)

Also, the ask argument to par is only used in interactive sessions, which is why it was not working here.

How to keep an RGL plot on the screen when using Rscript?

1 Answers1