The second release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-year history as a package started by Jeff in the summer of 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. It is still faster, and in my very biased eyes better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It prefers to live on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on the OS X due yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems where a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet — the build system could be extended — see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers welcome!).

This release brings us fixes and enhancements from three other contributors, a couple new example scripts, more robust builds, extended documentation and more — see below for details.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.1 (2016-08-06)

• Changes in examples

  • install2.r now passes on extra options past -- to R CMD INSTALL (PR #37 by Steven Pav)

  • Added rcc.r to run rcmdcheck::rcmdcheck()

  • Added (still simple) render.r to render (R)markdown

  • Several examples now support the -x or --usage flag to show extended help.

• Changes in build system

  • The AM_LDFLAGS variable is now set and used too (PR #38 by Mattias Ellert)

  • Three more directories, used when an explicit installation directory is set, are excluded (also #38 by Mattias)

  • Travis CI is now driven via run.sh from our fork, and deploys all packages as .deb binaries using our PPA where needed

• Changes in package

  • SystemRequirements now mentions the need for libR, i.e. an R built with a shared library so that we can embed R.

  • The docopt and rcmdcheck packages are now suggested, and added to the Travis installation.

  • A new helper function r() is now provided and exported so that the package can be imported (closes #40).

  • URL and BugReports links were added to DESCRIPTION.

• Changes in documentation

  • The help output for installGithub.r was corrected (PR #39 by Brandon Bertelsen)

Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page.

The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here — and now of course all from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). Binary packages are available directly in Debian as well as soon via Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter. will probably have new

Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.