UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi.

The "R" system is patterned after UNIX "S", but is free. See The R Project for Statistical Computing for more information.

The R system is intended to be used interactively so that one can explore data. However, there is a facility for batch jobs, and that is convenient for demonstrations. Here is such a set of commands:

Code:

test0 <- c(1, 2, 3)
test3 <- c(4.985e-10, 5.130e-10, 5.486e-10, 6.023e-10, 7.015e-10)
test4 <- c(4.869e-10, 5.010-10, 5.363e-10, 5.895e-10, 6.887e-10)

diff <- test3 - test4

diff

plot(diff)

quit()

Which, when run by R will produce this text output:

Code:

> test0 <- c(1, 2, 3)
> test3 <- c(4.985e-10, 5.130e-10, 5.486e-10, 6.023e-10, 7.015e-10)
> test4 <- c(4.869e-10, 5.010-10, 5.363e-10, 5.895e-10, 6.887e-10)
>
> diff <- test3 - test4
>
> diff
[1] 1.16e-11 4.99e+00 1.23e-11 1.28e-11 1.28e-11
>
> plot(diff)
>
> quit()

And there is a postscript plot file also generated.

In some sense, this is using a very big hammer, because this is a very small part of R. Still, if you manipulate data and need to do statistical calculations, this is a very nice system, especially since the style is very UNIX-like ... cheers, drl

Wow, thank you for all the examples under different tools. I will check if zsh exists on my work computer on Monday. My data was actually very small. There are probably 2-6 pairs of 5 numeric values at most. The values were obtained by several grep commands piped together. I work under UNIX through a windows program, so my Excel is always available. It just takes an extra step to output the data from UNIX to something Excel can read.