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bring_R_to_command_line.md

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If you ever wants to use R on the command line, now you have several opitions.

litter

I wanted to use littler for a long time on my mac, but was intimidated by the complex installation process. Since version 0.3.0, it is on CRAN,and can be installed within R console or Rstudio by:

> install.packages("littler")
Installing package into ‘/Users/mtang1/Library/R/3.3/library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/macosx/mavericks/contrib/3.3/littler_0.3.1.tgz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 50351 bytes (49 KB)
==================================================
downloaded 49 KB


The downloaded binary packages are in
	/var/folders/79/x06wz9v560q10gw881n9c_z0x7m0vl/T//RtmphlFEcc/downloaded_packages
> library(littler)
The littler package provides 'r' as a binary.
See 'vignette("littler-examples") for some illustrations.
On OS X, 'r' and 'R' are the same so 'lr' is an alternate name for littler.
You could link to the 'r' binary installed in
'/Users/mtang1/Library/R/3.3/library/littler/bin/r'
as '/usr/local/bin/lr' in order to use 'lr' for scripting.

you just need to make a symbolic link by:

ln -s /Users/mtang1/Library/R/3.3/library/littler/bin/r  /usr/local/bin/lr

Now you can start to use R as lr at the command line:

lr -h

Usage: r [options] [-|file]

Launch GNU R to execute the R commands supplied in the specified file, or
from stdin if '-' is used. Suitable for so-called shebang '#!/'-line scripts.

Options:
  -h, --help           Give this help list
      --usage          Give a short usage message
  -V, --version        Show the version number
  -v, --vanilla        Pass the '--vanilla' option to R
  -t, --rtemp          Use per-session temporary directory as R does
  -i, --interactive    Let interactive() return 'true' rather than 'false'
  -q, --quick          Skip autoload / delayed assign of default libraries
  -p, --verbose        Print the value of expressions to the console
  -l, --packages list  Load the R packages from the comma-separated 'list'
  -d, --datastdin      Prepend command to load 'X' as csv from stdin
  -L, --libpath dir    Add directory to library path via '.libPaths(dir)'
  -e, --eval expr      Let R evaluate 'expr'

Go to littler's page for more usage examples.

From this issue on github, I found one can install littler on mac by brew (this is really should be the way to manage software installation on mac)

brew tap homebrew/science
brew install littler

It will be installed as littler to avoid confusions.
NOTE I tried brew install as well, but it seems to be isolated with my installed R packages as it complains dplyr is not installed when I do littler -l dplyr,tidyr.

rscl and Rio.

Both are from the author of Data science at the command line: Jeroen Janssens.

if (packageVersion("devtools") < 1.6) {
  install.packages("devtools")
}
devtools::install_github("jeroenjanssens/rscl")

rscl::setup()
# If you want to invoke `rscl` from anywhere on your filesystem, add the line
# below to ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or whathever file your shell sources at startup.
export PATH="$PATH:/Users/mtang1/Library/R/3.3/library/rscl/bin"
>

on command line:

ln -s /Users/mtang1/Library/R/3.3/library/rscl/bin/

when I execute rscl, I got an segment fault error. I opened an issue on github.

For usage of Rio, see my previous blog post: csvkit to manipulate csv at command line, Rio to interact with R at command line