The sixth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than twelve-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. And it is (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 also always loaded the methods package which Rscript converted to rather recently.

littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default 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 are welcome!).

A few examples as highlighted at the Github repo:

This release updates two scripts I use all the time, and which were impacted by upstream changes in other packages they use. So roxy.r will now use the previous version of roxygen2 if found in ~/.R/cache – a location only otherwise used by this script. Similarly, rcmd.r needed an updated as rcmdcheck unexpectedly altered a function signature. A trivial rchk.r caller script was added to call the mostful rchk instance at rhub to test a source package.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.5 (2018-10-04)

• Changes in examples

  • The script roxy.r now uses cached copy of roxygen2 version 6.0.1 (if available) as the current version 6.1.0 changed behaviour.

  • The script rcc.r was updated as the underlying rcmdcheck changed parameter order.

  • A new simpler wrapper rchk.r was added to use RHub with the rchk image.

• Changes in package

  • Travis CI now uses the R 3.5 PPA

CRANberries provides 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 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.