R help - Oct 2008 - Can R scripts executed in batch mode take a commandline argument?

I have examined the documentation for batch mode use of R:

R CMD BATCH [options] infile [outfile]

The documentation for this seems rather spartan.  

Running "R CMD BATCH --help" gives me info on only two options: one
for
getting help and the other to get the version.  I see, further on, that
there are options for retoring and saving sessions (which I do not need to
do in this case), but are there other options defined?  If so, what are they
and how are they to be used?

However, it goes on to say: "Further arguments starting with a '-'
are
considered as options as long as '--' was not encountered, and are
passed on
to the R process, which by default is started with '--restore
--save'."

I see here it says further arguments starting with a '-' are passed to
the R
process, but usage is not clear.  For example, if I write a script that
should take as a commandline argument the name of a file that contains a
series of numbers that I want to place into a vector which, in turn I want
to pass to fitdistr(x,"exponential"), what do I do to get that file
name
from the commandline and pass it to, say, "read.csv"?

BTW: How would I tell it that there is no need to restore and save?

If I can't pass a commandline argument, do I have to write the arguments in
afile, and have that file read each time I need to run the script?

Thanks

Ted
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On Unix/Linux platforms, you can use the included Rscript utility by adding
the following shebang at the top of your program. Command line arguments can
then be retrieved using the commandArgs function:

#!/usr/bin/Rscript

args <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE)

args is now a character vector containing every space delimited text string
that followed your program name when you ran it. trailingOnly is set to TRUE
because the RScript interpreter prepends a few arguments of it's own that
you will probably have no use for.

As I stated earlier, this approach works great on Unix/Linux systems, I
havn't tested it in a Windows environment.

Good Luck!

-Charlie

-----
Charlie Sharpsteen
Undergraduate
Environmental Resources Engineering
Humboldt State University
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