Utilities for checking whether the sources of an R add-on package work correctly, and for building a source package from them.
R CMD check [options] pkgdirs
R CMD build [options] pkgdirsa list of names of directories with sources of R
add-on packages. For check these can also be the filenames of
compressed tar archives with extension .tar.gz,
.tgz, .tar.bz2 or .tar.xz.
further options to control the processing, or for obtaining information about usage and version of the utility.
R CMD check
checks R add-on packages from their sources, performing a wide
variety of diagnostic checks.
R CMD build builds R source tarballs. The name(s) of the
packages are taken from the DESCRIPTION files and not from the
directory names. This works entirely on a copy of the supplied source
directories.
Use R CMD foo --help to obtain usage information on
utility foo.
The defaults for some of the options to R CMD build can be
set by environment variables _R_BUILD_RESAVE_DATA_ and
_R_BUILD_COMPACT_VIGNETTES_: see ‘Writing R Extensions’.
Many of the checks in R CMD check can be turned off or on by
environment variables: see Chapter 6 of the ‘R Internals’ manual.
By default R CMD build uses the "internal" option to
tar to prepare the tarball. An external tar
program can be specified by the R_BUILD_TAR environment
variable. This may be substantially faster for very large packages,
and can be needed for packages with long path names (over 100 bytes)
or very large files (over 8GB): however, the resulting tarball may not
be portable.
R CMD check by default unpacks tarballs by the internal
untar function: if needed an external tar
command can be specified by the environment variable
R_INSTALL_TAR: please ensure that it can handle the type of
compression used on the tarball. (This is sometimes needed for
tarballs containing invalid or unsupported sections, and can be faster
on very large tarballs. Setting R_INSTALL_TAR to tar.exe
has been needed to overcome permissions issues on some Windows
systems.)
The sections on “Checking and building packages” and
“Processing Rd format” in “Writing R Extensions”
(see on Unix-alikes the doc/manual subdirectory of the R source tree,
on Windows, see the Manuals sub-menu of the Help menu on the console).