‘littler’ was started as a CRAN package by Jeffrey Horner in summer of 2006. Now, more than ten years later, the second release of littler is now available. littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript.
What is littler?
littler provides the r program with a simplified command-line interface for GNU R, allowing for the direct execution of commands by using piping, where the output of a particular program will be supplied as input to the next program, as well as adding the ability for writing ‘hash-bang’ scripts, i.e. creating executable files.
As mentioned in the R-Bloggers, the new release of littler is said to be faster than the previous version and allows for piping as well as shebang scripting via #! , which uses command-line arguments consistently which makes it start faster.
Changes in littler v0.3.1 are:
Changes in examples
- install2.r now passes on extra options past -- to R CMD INSTALL (PR #37 by Steven Pav)
- Added rcc.r to run rcmd check::rcmd check()
- Added (still simple) render.r to render (R)markdown
- Several examples now support the -x or --usage flag to show extended help.
Changes in build system
- The AM_LDFLAGS variable is now set and used too (PR #38 by Mattias Ellert)
- Three more directories, used when an explicit installation directory is set, are excluded (also #38 by Mattias)
- Travis CI is now driven via run.sh from our fork and deploys all packages as .deb binaries using our PPA where needed
Changes in package
- System Requirements now mentions the need for libR, i.e. an R built with a shared library so that we can embed R.
- The docopt and rcmd check packages are now suggested and added to the Travis installation.
- A new helper function r() is now provided and exported so that the package can be imported (closes#40).
- URL and BugReports links were added to DESCRIPTION.
Changes in documentation
- The help output for install Github.r was corrected (PR #39 by Brandon Bertelsen)
For the complete details on the release, click here.
CRAN package for littler 0.3.1 - Download
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