The fourth 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 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. 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. Last but not least it is also less silly than Rscript and always loads the methods package avoiding those bizarro bugs between code running in R itself and a scripting front-end.

littler prefers to live on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on OS X due to 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!).

A few examples as highlighted at the Github repo:

This release brings a few new examples scripts, extends a few existing ones and also includes two fixes thanks to Carl. Again, no internals were changed. The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.3 (2017-12-17)

• Changes in examples

  • The script installGithub.r now correctly uses the upgrade argument (Carl Boettiger in #49).

  • New script pnrrs.r to call the package-native registration helper function added in R 3.4.0

  • The script install2.r now has more robust error handling (Carl Boettiger in #50).

  • New script cow.r to use R Hub’s check_on_windows

  • Scripts cow.r and c4c.r use #!/usr/bin/env r

  • New option --fast (or -f) for scripts build.r and rcc.r for faster package build and check

  • The build.r script now defaults to using the current directory if no argument is provided.

  • The RStudio getters now use the rvest package to parse the webpage with available versions.

• Changes in package

  • Travis CI now uses https to fetch script, and sets the group

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. 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.

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.