[Rd] R as shell script

Juha Vierinen jvierine at gmail.com
Fri Jul 14 16:15:01 CEST 2006


Hi,

I am considering if I should invest in learning R. Based on the
language definition and introductory documents, it seems nice. But now
I am faced with a problem: I want to be able to run R programs easily
from the unix shell, and write scripts that can automatically select R
as the interpreter:

#!/usr/bin/R
cat("Hello world.\n")

This of course doesn't work, because /usr/bin/R is a shell script.

I have been able to create a binary wrapper that calls R with the
correct arguments, which is documented here:

http://kavaro.fi/mediawiki/index.php/Using_R_from_the_shell

This still lacks eg. standard input (but I have no idea how I can
implement it in R) and full command line argument passing (can be
done), but am I on the right track, or is there already something that
does what I need?

juha



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