Disabling the cat command

Here is a funny hack that comments out all the cat()'s in a function. Not sure if this gives errors or breaks the function though:

foo <- deparse(f)
f <- eval(parse(text=gsub("cat","#cat",foo)))

f()

[1] 1

Edit:

Another option is basically Juba's answer, using sink, but you can use the Defaults package to change the default behavior of cat. The file argument basically sinks its output in a file. So :

library("Defaults")
setDefaults(cat,file="sink.txt")

f()

Ensures that only output of cat and not print or so is sinked. However, this drastically reduces the runtime since now a file is opened and closed everytime cat() is run.

This should work?

oldcat = cat
cat = function( ..., file="", sep=" ", fill=F, labels=NULL, append=F ) {}
f()
cat = oldcat

Just replace cat with an empty function, and then set it back on completion

On Linux, you can use a sink() call to /dev/null(or to a temporary file on another OS, see ?tempfile) :

sink(file="/dev/null")
f()
sink()