The tenth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the thirteen-ish 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 as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do more 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!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH.

A few examples are highlighted at the Github repo, as well as in the examples vignette.

This release adds several new helper scripts / examples such as a Solaris-checker for rhub, a Sweave runner, and bibtex-record printer for packages. It also extends several existing scripts: render.r can now compact pdf files, build.r does this for package builds, tt.r covers parallel tinytest use, rcc.r reports the exit code from rcmdcheck, update.r corrects which package library directories it looks at, kitten.r can add puppies for tinytest, and thanks to Stefan the dratInsert.r (and render.r) script use call. correctly in stop().

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.9 (2019-10-27)

• Changes in examples

  • The use of call. in stop() was corrected (Stefan Widgren in #72).

  • New script cos.r to check (at rhub) on Solaris.

  • New script compactpdf.r to compact pdf files.

  • The build.r script now compacts vignettes and resaves data.

  • The tt.r script now supports parallel tests and side effects.

  • The rcc.r script can now report error codes.

  • The ‘–libloc’ option to update.r was updated.

  • The render.r script can optionally compact pdfs.

  • New script sweave.r to render (and compact) pdfs.

  • New script pkg2bibtex.r to show bibtex entries.

  • The kitten.r script has a new option --puppy to add tinytest support in purring packages.

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.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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