R help - Jan 2011 - R command execution from shell

Dear R-users,

Is there a way I can ask R to execute the "write("hello 
world",file="hello.txt")" command directly from the UNIX
shell, instead
of having to save this command to a .R file and execute this file with R 
CMD BATCH?

Thank you

Sebastien

On 04/01/2011 3:21 PM, Sebastien Bihorel wrote:
> Dear R-users,
>
> Is there a way I can ask R to execute the "write("hello
> world",file="hello.txt")" command directly from the
UNIX shell, instead
> of having to save this command to a .R file and execute this file with R
> CMD BATCH?
Yes.  Some versions of R support the -e option on the command line to 
execute a particular command.  It's not always easy to work out the 
escapes so your shell passes all the quotes through...  An alternative 
is to echo the command into the shell, e.g.

echo 'cat("hello")' | R --slave

(where the outer ' ' are just for bash).

Duncan Murdoch