PLAIN TEXT WORKFLOW GNU MAKE SERIES

An overall strategy is outlined for Makefile construction and illustrated via simple and complex examples. Additional flexibility is incorporated for modifying standard program options.

Rules are used by adding a single line to project Makefiles. This article addresses these issues by providing GNU Make pattern rules for R, Sweave, rmarkdown, SAS, Stata, Perl and Python to streamline management of data analysis and reporting projects. Without such rules, Makefiles can become unwieldy and error-prone. As projects increase in size, difficulties arise because GNU Make does not have inbuilt rules for statistical and related software. It is relatively simple to construct Makefiles for small data analysis projects. In addition to facilitating the management of and documenting the workflow of a complex data analysis project, such automation can help minimize errors and make the project more reproducible. GNU Make may be used to automate the mundane task of regenerating output given dependencies between syntax and data files. Manually repeating these steps is problematic in that some necessary steps may be left out or some reported results may not be for the most recent data set or syntax. And like any programming editor, it needs a number of packages for an academic writing (rather than coding) workflow. just type make and hit enter documenting a workflow documenting dependencies among data, code. It integrates with GitHub for version control if you’re into that. Real world data analysis often requires an iterative process because many of these steps may need to be repeated any number of times. GNU Make is a formal system for: automating a workflow. Many processing workflows involve reading and writing files with a set of commands, that must be done in a given order and some dependencies. To facilitate reproducible research, rather than employing a relatively ad-hoc point-and-click cut-and-paste approach, we typically break down these tasks into manageable chunks by employing separate files of statistical, programming or text processing syntax for each step including the final report. Python and bash utilities to generate a workflow of file processing based on GNU make.

PLAIN TEXT WORKFLOW GNU MAKE SERIES

Data analysis projects invariably involve a series of steps such as reading, cleaning, summarizing and plotting data, statistical analysis and reporting.

Plain text workflow gnu make