Progress bar in R

A decent percentage of working time in R, I spend looping over chromosomes, transcription factors or tissues, usually, using parallelization.

To get the stuff to run simultaneously I use the foreach function from the doMC package, and for monitoring of the progress of the execution, I made use of the cat/print functions, which mostly just clutter the terminal.

Today a friend of mine set me a link to this blog, and I was dumbfounded when I read that the R base package has an inbuilt function for a nice looking progress bar. To my luck, it works perfectly when put inside a foreach loop.

library(doMC)
registerDoMC(5)
total <- 200
# create progress bar
pb <- txtProgressBar(min = 0, max = total, style = 3)
foreach(i = 1:total)%dopar%{
   Sys.sleep(0.1)
   setTxtProgressBar(pb, i)
}
close(pb)