Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sat, 24 Jul 2021

littler 0.3.13: Moar Goodies

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The fourteenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now fifteen 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 were 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 brings two new example scripts and command wrappers (compiledDeps.r, silenceTwitterAccount.r), along with extensions, corrections, or polish for a number a of other examples as detailed in the NEWS file entry below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.13 (2021-07-24)

  • Changes in examples

    • New script compiledDeps.r to show which dependencies are compiled

    • New script silenceTwitterAccount.r wrapping rtweet

    • The -c or --code option for installRSPM.r was corrected

    • The kitten.r script now passes options ‘bunny’ and ‘puppy’ on to the pkgKitten::kitten() call; new options to call the Arma and Eigen variants were added

    • The getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r scripts were updated for a change in rvest

    • Two typos in the tt.r help message were correct (Aaron Wolen in #86)

    • The message in cranIncoming.r was corrected.

  • Changes in package

    • Added Continuous Integration runner via run.sh from r-ci.

    • Two vignettes got two extra vignette attributes.

    • The mkdocs-material documentation input was moved.

    • The basic unit tests were slightly refactored and updated.

My CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page, and now also on the new package docs website. 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.

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

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