Disable plot display in R

Question

I am trying to turn off the display of plot in R.

I read Disable GUI, graphics devices in R but the only solution given is to write the plot to a file.

What if I

Answer 1

Luckily it seems that NbClust is one giant messy function with some other functions in it and lots of icky looking code. The plotting is done in one of two places.

Create a copy of NbClust:

> MyNbClust = NbClust

and then edit this function. Change the header to:

MyNbClust <-
    function (data, diss = "NULL", distance = "euclidean", min.nc = 2, 
              max.nc = 15, method = "ward", index = "all", alphaBeale = 0.1, plotetc=FALSE) 
{

and then wrap the plotting code in if blocks. Around line 1588:

    if(plotetc){
        par(mfrow = c(1, 2))
        [etc]
        cat(paste(...
    }

and similarly around line 1610. Save. Now use:

 nc = MyNbClust(...etc....)

and you see no plots unless you add plotetc=TRUE.

Then ask the devs to include your patch.

Answer 2

You can wrap the call in

pdf(file = NULL)

and

dev.off()

This sends all the output to a null file which effectively hides it.