From romain.francois at dbmail.com  Wed Sep  2 14:13:38 2009
From: romain.francois at dbmail.com (Romain Francois)
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:13:38 +0200
Subject: [Rd] How to ship R scripts with R packages ?
In-Reply-To: <4A9E5356.4020907@stats.uwo.ca>
References: <4A9E4F3D.5070704@dbmail.com> <4A9E5356.4020907@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <4A9E6172.8000201@dbmail.com>

On 09/02/2009 01:13 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>
> Romain Francois wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> (This is a remix of this previous thread:
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-August/054264.html , but
>> with a concrete example)
>>
>> I am developing some packages that contain scripts (for Rscript) and
>> would like to know what is the best/recommended way to ship these
>> scripts.
>>
>> An example is the "ant" package (R capable version of apache ant, see
>> http://tr.im/xHLs). The package has a ant.R script in the exec
>> directory and here is how I use it :
>>
>> $ `Rscript -e "cat( system.file( 'exec', 'ant.R', package = 'ant' ) ) " `
>>
>> ... not so pretty. Meanwhile, "Writing R extensions" talks about the
>> exec directory, but it is not clear if I can use it this way or how.
>>
>
> I think exec is a reasonable place to put the script. If you don't want
> to type that long command above, why not put it in a small function in
> the package? E.g. define
>
> antR <- function() cat( system.file( 'exec', 'ant.R', package = 'ant' ) )
>
> then you can run it with
>
> Rscript -e "ant::antR()"
>
> Duncan Murdoch

Yes. I'd have to do a bit more work to call the script with parameters. 
Something like this perhaps:

antR <- function( run = FALSE){
	rscript    <- file.path( R.home(), "bin", "Rscript" )
	ant.script <- system.file( 'exec', 'ant.R', package = 'ant' )
	cmd <- sprintf( '"%s" "%s" %s',
		rscript, ant.script, paste( commandArgs( TRUE), collapse = " " )
	
	if( run ){
		system( cmd )
	} else {
		run
	}
}

...

I guess i am looking for a mechanism similar to the dispatch of CMD, but 
able to dispatch within exec directories of packages :

$ R CMD exec ant ant.R

or maybe a --package switch in Rscript:

$ Rscript --package ant ant.R

or a Rexec script similar to Rscript :

$ Rexec ant/ant.R

-- 
Romain Francois
Professional R Enthusiast
+33(0) 6 28 91 30 30
http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
|- http://tr.im/xHLs : R capable version of ant
|- http://tr.im/xHiZ : Tip: get java home from R with rJava
`- http://tr.im/xkMc : Combine R CMD build and junit



[Rd] How to ship R scripts with R packages ?
Romain Francois