Rscript on Windows

I mentioned this twice already and no one answered;however, I am mentioning
this a third time since its a serious deficiency.   

that is upcoming in R is useful but on Windows one will often be relegated
to having two files: a batch file and an R file unless the -x switch
is implemented
to allow them to be combined.  This is not a problem on UNIX which supports
#! but on Windows we need -x.  Every other common scripting language including
perl, python and ruby supports -x for this purpose.

(The -x flag would start R processing at the first line that begins with #! so
that prior lines could be Windows batch commands allowing the same file
to be used as a batch file and an R file.)

Note that there is a bug in Windows which means that if you simply associate
.R to running R then the result cannot be redirected.  There is a bug
fix available
for this but I think we need to be able to run out of the box for something this
common.


On 1/29/07, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:

Haven't got any feedback on this one.

Will we be getting a perl/python/ruby style -x switch for Rscript for R 2.5.0?

It certainly would give more flexibility to users of Rscript on non-UNIX systems
where #! notation is not available.

On 1/26/07, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:

Good idea.  ruby seems to work the same way.  python does too but with
a slightly different definition:

C:\> ruby -h | findstr strip
 -x[directory]   strip off text before #!ruby line and perhaps cd to directory

C:\> perl -h | findstr strip
 -x[directory]   strip off text before #!perl line and perhaps cd to directory

C:\> python -h | findstr skip
-x     : skip first line of source, allowing use of non-Unix forms of #!cmd


On 1/26/07, Vladimir Eremeev <wl2776 at gmail.com> wrote:

ActivePerl has '-x' switch which tells it to skip all lines in the file till
"#!".
This allows writing perl scripts in ordinary .bat files.

?shQuote contains a link with the following perl script example:
===8<===
@echo off
:: hello.bat
:: Windows executable Perl script
:: Note:
::   assumes perl.exe is in path
::   otherwise, use absolute path
perl -x -S "%0" %*
goto end
#!perl

print "Hello, World!\n";
__END__
:end
:: ------ end of hello.bat ------

Windows Notes:
" -x " (lower case x): Skip all text until shebang line.
" -S " (upper case S): Look for script using PATH variable. Special meaning
in Windows: appends .bat or .cmd if lookup for name fails and name does not
have either suffix.
" %* " only on WinNT/2K/XP; use %1 %2 . . . %9 on Win9x/DOS
===8<===

I think the simplest way to implement shebang on windows would be embedding
one more command line switch with similar functionality to perl's '-x'.

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