what is best for scripting?

I do nearly all my scripting in R if its part of an R project.  That keeps
things simple since everything is in one language.  See ?BATCH,
?commandArgs, ?readLines, ?system, ?grep, ?regex (and commands
pointed to by it).  If your script deals with XML, see the R XML package.

If R is not involved I may use R anyways for scripting since its powerful
and I already use it for other tasks but if I don't use R then I will use
awk/gawk because its simple and fast.

If its important to eliminate all external dependencies I will use Windows
batch (or jscript/javascript) as in
  http://cran.r-project.org/contrib/extra/batchfiles/

I don't find I rarely need anything beyond that.  I used to use
perl in my pre-R days but since using R don't find I need it any more.
I have played with python and it looks very nice but for most
R problems its probably also unnecessary.

I am using R in Windows. I see that I will have to use batch processes with
R. I will have to read and write text files, and run some R code; probably
some external code too. I have never done scripting. Is there any document
that explains simple steps with examples? I also have heard that Python is a
good scripting language. Is it worth the effort? (I do not have too much
free time, so if I could do without, much better ...).

Has anybody strong opinions on that? Past experiences?

Thank you!

Jordi



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