Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sun, 17 Dec 2023

littler 0.3.19 on CRAN: Several Updates

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The twentieth release of littler as a CRAN package landed a few minutes ago, following in the now seventeen 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 began 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 contains a fair number of small changes and improvements to some of the example scripts is run daily.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.19 (2023-12-17)

  • Changes in examples scripts

    • The help or usage text display for r2u.r, ttt.r, check.r has been improved, expanded or corrected, respectively

    • installDeps.r has a new argument for dependency selection

    • An initial 'single test file' runner tttf.r has been added

    • r2u.r has two new options for setting / varying the Debian build version of package that is built, and one for BioConductor builds, one for a 'dry run' build, and a new --compile option

    • installRSPM.r, installPPM.r, installP3M.r have been updates to reflect the name changes

    • installRub.r now understands 'package@universe' too

    • tt.r flips the default of the --effects switch

My CRANberries service provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page, and also on the 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 (in a day or two) 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 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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