[Rd] Excel -> *.CSV in Unix (Linux) command line?

[Martin Maechler]

A colleague has a dozen of excel sheets and also expects to get updates
regularly.  He could open these in M$-Excel and export as *.csv manually,
"bring back to Unix" and then read into R.  Of course there must be options to
start programming this in something like visual basic,
but we wouldn't to really want to...

We also know that probably Gnumeric could do the job (since the xls files
are said to be simple ...), but as far as I know that also does only work
manually (and via GUI). 
"gnumeric --help" does not suggest a command line version.
Are there other options (i.e. free software programs) to use from the
command line (i.e. also in a shell script or from inside R)?

Since this is not really an R topic, please reply to my e-mail only,
not to R-help, and I'll summarize.  Thanks in advance!

Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>	http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/
Seminar fuer Statistik, ETH-Zentrum  LEO D10	Leonhardstr. 27
ETH (Federal Inst. Technology)	8092 Zurich	SWITZERLAND
phone: x-41-1-632-3408		fax: ...-1228			<><
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._