The third release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-year history as a package started by Jeff in the summer of 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. It is still faster, and in my very biased eyes better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It prefers to live on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on OS X due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems where 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 welcome!).

This release brings several new examples script to run package checks, use the extraordinary R Hub, download RStudio daily builds, and more — see below for details. No internals were changed.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.2 (2017-02-14)

• Changes in examples

  • New scripts getRStudioServer.r and getRStudioDesktop.r to download daily packages, currently defaults to Ubuntu amd64

  • New script c4c.r calling rhub::check_for_cran()

  • New script rd2md.r to convert Rd to markdown.

  • New script build.r to create a source tarball.

  • The installGitHub.r script now use package remotes (PR #44, #46)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here — and now of course all from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). Binary packages are available directly in Debian as well as soon via Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter.

Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.