The eleventh release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the fourteen-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 in recent years.

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 a new helper / example script installBioc.r for BioConductor package installation, generalizes the roxygenize() wrapper roxy.r a little, and polished a couple of other corners.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.10 (2020-06-02)

• Changes in examples

  • The update.r script only considers writeable directories.

  • The rcc.r script tries to report full logs by setting _R_CHECK_TESTS_NLINES_=0.

  • The tt.r script has an improved ncpu fallback.

  • Several installation and updating scripts set _R_SHLIB_STRIP_ to TRUE.

  • A new script installBioc.r was added.

  • The --error option to install2.r was generalized (Sergio Oller in #78).

  • The roxy.r script was extended a little.

• Changes in package

  • Travis CI now uses R 4.0.0 and the bionic distro

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 also 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.