[R] R command execution from shell

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 04/01/2011 3:21 PM, Sebastien Bihorel wrote:
> Dear R-users,
>
> Is there a way I can ask R to execute the "write("hello
> world",file="hello.txt")" command directly from the UNIX shell, instead
> of having to save this command to a .R file and execute this file with R
> CMD BATCH?

Yes.  Some versions of R support the -e option on the command line to 
execute a particular command.  It's not always easy to work out the 
escapes so your shell passes all the quotes through...  An alternative 
is to echo the command into the shell, e.g.

echo 'cat("hello")' | R --slave

(where the outer ' ' are just for bash).

Duncan Murdoch