rstudio - is it possible to run a code in the background

Question

Question regarding RStudio. Suppose I am running a code in the console:

> code1()

assume that code1() prints nothing on the con

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

The mcparallel() function in the parallel package will do the trick, if you are on Linux, that is ...

library(parallel)
Job1 = mcparallel(code1())
JobResult1 = mccollect(Job1)

Answer 3

You can always do this, which is not ideal but works for most purposes:

shell(cmd = 'Rscript.exe some_script.R', wait=FALSE)

Answer 4

RStudio as of version 1.2 provides this feature. To run a script in the background select "Start Job" in the "Jobs" panel. You also have the option of copying the background job result into the working environment.