Rscript on Windows

I think its best if core mods are done by the core group while others
focus on work that can be done external to the core.

Thus, what I have done is to enhance the batchfiles distribution with
3 new batchfiles: Rscript.bat, #Rscript.bat and runR.bat which will be
part of the
next distribution of batchfiles but can be obtained now, if desired, from the
batchfiles svn (with the caveat that they require R 2.5.0).  The batchfiles
home page is here:

   http://code.google.com/p/batchfiles

The source tab on that page gets you to the svn and the links on the right
include links to the NEWS and README files which describe the additions,
a link to info on the Windows bug that I mentioned and two perl links that
describe how this all works in perl which may be a helpful analogous
situation.
.
On 2/17/07, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

On 2/16/2007 9:35 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

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

I agree this would be a reasonable addition, but I wouldn't class it as
a serious deficiency, and I don't plan to work on it myself.

If you want to put together patches to the trunk code and docs to
implement this I'll review them and possibly commit them.  If you don't
see this as a high enough priority to do that, then I'd suggest doing
what I do:  don't use the CMD.EXE shell.  There are a number of
Unix-like shells available in Windows (Cygwin, MSYS, etc.) that can
handle the #! syntax just fine.  Or just use two files, as you describe
below.

Duncan Murdoch

 > The Rscript facility
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'.

--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Rscript-on-Windows-tf3120774.html#a8651815
Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.