Matt's suggestion works in Linux (I use Ubuntu and Debian variants), but I haven't yet been able to get it to work in Windows. In a DOS terminal, I can run Cygwin's blas.exe via
blas -c "read -t 1 -n 1" and get the right functioning, but when embedded in R in various ways, I get several error messages that imply R is not finding or interpreting the command correctly. As the details are arcane, please contact me off-line, and I'll report back to the list when we have a solution. However, if someone could try Matt's suggestion on a Mac and let me know outcome, that would be helpful. Since .Platform allows me to determine OS type, I should be able to work out a more or less platform-independent function. JN biostatmatt wrote: > On Thu, 2010-05-27 at 19:08 -0400, Prof. John C Nash wrote: >> I would like to have a function that would wait either until a specified >> timeout (in >> seconds preferably) or until a key is pressed. > .... If you are using Linux > you can use try this > >> system("read -t 1 -n 1") > > where -n indicates the number of characters to read and -t specifies the > timeout in seconds. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.