R help - Oct 2012 - good documentation on use of Rscript. where to find?

What is the correct format for the shebang line and what options are
allowed or necessary along with this?

I find plenty of blogs and opinions, but few authoritative answers.

I want an R script to run and update packages periodically, with a
cron job that launches it. What is necessary to put in
line one of the R program. Aside from the basic part

#!/usr/bin/Rscript

what else can there be, or should there be?

Various people suggest adding things like "--vanilla" but those seem
not to be accepted, at least on RedHat EL 6 with R-2.15.1.  I'd like
to run this with a command line like:

$ R-labSelectInstall-02.R > /tmp/Rupdate.txt 2>&1

so that all the standard output and err goes to a text file, but I've
not found a way to make it work comparably to the R command line
option --vanilla or such.

# ./R-labSelectInstall-02.R --vanilla
'ARNING: unknown option '--vanilla

See what I mean?

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science      Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504      Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas                 University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org               http://quant.ku.edu

On 18/10/2012 12:56 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
> What is the correct format for the shebang line and what options are
> allowed or necessary along with this?
>
> I find plenty of blogs and opinions, but few authoritative answers.
The authoritative source for the options is the R help page ?Rscript.

The authoritative answers for the format are likely slightly more 
difficult, because it is your shell that processes the file, it's not R 
handling the command line.  But ?Rscript does give examples.

Duncan Murdoch
>
> I want an R script to run and update packages periodically, with a
> cron job that launches it. What is necessary to put in
> line one of the R program. Aside from the basic part
>
> #!/usr/bin/Rscript
>
> what else can there be, or should there be?
>
> Various people suggest adding things like "--vanilla" but those
seem
> not to be accepted, at least on RedHat EL 6 with R-2.15.1.  I'd like
> to run this with a command line like:
>
> $ R-labSelectInstall-02.R > /tmp/Rupdate.txt 2>&1
>
> so that all the standard output and err goes to a text file, but I've
> not found a way to make it work comparably to the R command line
> option --vanilla or such.
>
> # ./R-labSelectInstall-02.R --vanilla
> 'ARNING: unknown option '--vanilla
>
> See what I mean?
>