| Title: | R at the Command-Line via 'r' |
|---|---|
| Description: | A scripting and command-line front-end is provided by 'r' (aka 'littler') as a lightweight binary wrapper around the GNU R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. While R can be used in batch mode, the r binary adds full support for both 'shebang'-style scripting (i.e. using a hash-mark-exclamation-path expression as the first line in scripts) as well as command-line use in standard Unix pipelines. In other words, r provides the R language without the environment. |
| Authors: | Dirk Eddelbuettel and Jeff Horner (2006-2008) |
| Maintainer: | Dirk Eddelbuettel <[email protected]> |
| License: | GPL (>= 2) |
| Version: | 0.3.20.1 |
| Built: | 2024-08-28 14:18:04 UTC |
| Source: | https://github.com/eddelbuettel/littler |
The r binary provides a convenient and powerful front-end.
By embedding R, it permits four distinct ways to leverage the power of R at
the shell prompt: scripting, filename execution, piping and direct expression
evaluation.
The r front-end was written with four distinct usage modes in mind.
First, it allow to write so-called ‘shebang’ scripts starting with
#!/usr/bin/env r. These ‘shebang’ scripts are
perfectly suited for automation and execution via e.g. via cron.
Second, we can use r somefile.R to quickly execute the name R source file.
This is useful as r is both easy to type—and quicker to start that either
R itself, or its scripting tool Rscript, while still loading the
methods package.
Third, r can be used in ‘pipes’ which are very common in Unix. A
simple and trivial example is echo 'cat(2+2)' | r illustrating that the
standard output of one program can be used as the standard input of another
program.
Fourth, r can be used as a calculator by supplying expressions after the
-e or --eval options.
Common with other shell tools and programs, r returns its exit code where
a value of zero indicates success.
On OS X one may have to link the binary to, say, lr instead. As OS X
insists that files named R and r are the same, we cannot use the
latter.
Jeff Horner and Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote littler from 2006 to today, with
contributions from several others.
Dirk Eddelbuettel [email protected] is the maintainer.
## Not run: #!/usr/bin/env r ## for use in scripts other input | r ## for use in pipes r somefile.R ## for running files r -e 'expr' ## for evaluating expressions r --help ## to show a quick synopsis ## End(Not run)## Not run: #!/usr/bin/env r ## for use in scripts other input | r ## for use in pipes r somefile.R ## for running files r -e 'expr' ## for evaluating expressions r --help ## to show a quick synopsis ## End(Not run)
r BinaryReturn the path of the install r binary.
r(usecat = FALSE)r(usecat = FALSE)
usecat |
Optional toggle to request output to stdout (useful in Makefiles) |
The test for Windows is of course superfluous as we have no binary for Windows. Maybe one day...
The path is returned as character variable. If the usecat option is
set the character variable is displayed via cat instead.
Dirk Eddelbuettel