R: track down errors that come primarily from non-interactive R sessions; prints a stack trace and continues on

stack_trace.R

# Printing stack trace and continuing after error occurs in R
# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1975110/printing-stack-trace-and-continuing-after-error-occurs-in-r
# Bob Albright
# I wrote this code about a week ago to help me track down errors that come primarily from non-interactive R sessions. It's still a little rough, but it prints a stack trace and continues on. Let me know if this is useful, I'd be interested in how you would make this more informative. I'm also open into cleaner ways to get this information.

options(warn = 2, keep.source = TRUE, error = 
  quote({ 
    cat("Environment:\n", file=stderr()); 

    # TODO: setup option for dumping to a file (?)
    # Set `to.file` argument to write this to a file for post-mortem debugging    
    dump.frames();  # writes to last.dump

    #
    # Debugging in R
    #   http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/debuggingR/index.shtml
    #
    # Post-mortem debugging
    #   http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/debuggingR/pmd.shtml
    #
    # Relation functions:
    #   dump.frames
    #   recover
    # >>limitedLabels  (formatting of the dump with source/line numbers)
    #   sys.frame (and associated)
    #   traceback
    #   geterrmessage
    #
    # Output based on the debugger function definition.

    n <- length(last.dump)
    calls <- names(last.dump)
    cat(paste("  ", 1L:n, ": ", calls, sep = ""), sep = "\n", file=stderr())
    cat("\n", file=stderr())

    if (!interactive()) {
      q()
    }
  }))