安排邮件R / Knitr报告

Question

I need to schedule some monthly reports that need to be sent by email. I love the flexibility of R for analisys and data manipulation and even if not very experienced with knitr I would manage to produce the reports I need. My problem is with the mailing bit. What would be the best workflow to achieve this?

Answer 1

I have never done this kind of job but if I have to do, I would not use an R package to send mail. I would use something like Mutt (available on windows also) Mail User Agent to send my report as an attachment. Do I would create a batch mailsender.(sh|bat) that launch this R script mailsender.R :

   source('genreport.R')  ## here you will call for example knit2pdf('myreport.Rnw')
   writeLines(message,p<-pipe('mutt -s mySubject -a myreport.pdf -- mail@mail.com'))
   close(p)

Your batch/shell script contain :

  Rscript path_to_mailsender_\mailsender.R

Finally you can use cron or windows scheduler ( I don't know for mac) to schedule monthly this job.

For example using cron , you need somthing like this to send you report at 8pm on the first of every month:

       0 8 1 * * /path/to/mailsender.sh