littler
A scripting and command-line front-end for GNU R permitting use of R in command-line contexts.
So What Does it Do?
#!/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 synopsisSee the examples vignette for a full set of introductory examples. Also see the examples/ directory, as well as maybe the older tests directory both of which are installed with the package.
Installation
Version 0.3.0 or later
The package resides on the CRAN network and can be installed via
install.packages("littler")Previous Versions up to 0.2.3
In general, simply running the script bootstrap will configure and build the
executable. Running make install (possibly as sudo make install) will
install the resulting binary.
On Linux systems, ensure you have the autotools-dev package (or its
equivalent on non-Debian/Ubuntu systems). On OS X, you may need to run brew
install automake autoconf to get all the tools.
Alternate Naming
On some operating systems such as OS X, r is not different from R. As
this risk confusing the main binary R for the R system with our smaller
scripting frontend r, we suggest to consider running configure
--program-prefix="l" which this leads to installation of a binary lr
instead of r.
Alternate R Version
As littler uses autoconf its AC_PATH_PROG() macro to find R, one can
simply adjust the PATH when calling configure (or, rather, bootstrap)
to have another version of R used. For example, on a server with R-devel in
this location, the following builds littler using this R-devel version:
PATH="/usr/local/lib/R-devel/bin/:$PATH" ./bootstrap.
More Information
For more information about littler, please see
(but note that the latter now overlaps with the example vignette).
Authors
Jeff Horner and Dirk Eddelbuettel
License
GPL (>= 2)