R devel - Sep 2009 - How to ship R scripts with R packages ?

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.

Romain

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Romain Francois
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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

> Romain
>
>