I’ve been trying to find a R equivalent to Python’s subprocess and so far I’ve failed. Since a capability to handle child processes in a way that’s more sophisticated than a simple system() call (R has two of them, system() and system2()) might turn out handy I decided to build a new package for R. It’s name is of course subprocess and you can find it on github.

Right now it’s not much – it works only in Linux, it allows you to start a new process, write to its standard input and read from its standard output and standard error output. However, before I put more work into it, I wanted to make sure I’m not repeating someone else’s work – and if it turns out there is value in this work, to see what other R users might want this new package to have.

Comments appreciated!