How can I read command line parameters from an R script?

Solution 1:

Dirk's answer here is everything you need. Here's a minimal reproducible example.

I made two files: exmpl.bat and exmpl.R.

• exmpl.bat:

  set R_Script="C:\Program Files\R-3.0.2\bin\RScript.exe"
  %R_Script% exmpl.R 2010-01-28 example 100 > exmpl.batch 2>&1
  

  Alternatively, using Rterm.exe:

  set R_TERM="C:\Program Files\R-3.0.2\bin\i386\Rterm.exe"
  %R_TERM% --no-restore --no-save --args 2010-01-28 example 100 < exmpl.R > exmpl.batch 2>&1
  

• exmpl.R:

  options(echo=TRUE) # if you want see commands in output file
  args <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE)
  print(args)
  # trailingOnly=TRUE means that only your arguments are returned, check:
  # print(commandArgs(trailingOnly=FALSE))
  
  start_date <- as.Date(args[1])
  name <- args[2]
  n <- as.integer(args[3])
  rm(args)
  
  # Some computations:
  x <- rnorm(n)
  png(paste(name,".png",sep=""))
  plot(start_date+(1L:n), x)
  dev.off()
  
  summary(x)
  

Save both files in the same directory and start exmpl.bat. In the result you'll get:

• example.png with some plot
• exmpl.batch with all that was done

You could also add an environment variable %R_Script%:

"C:\Program Files\R-3.0.2\bin\RScript.exe"

and use it in your batch scripts as %R_Script% <filename.r> <arguments>

Differences between RScript and Rterm:

• Rscript has simpler syntax
• Rscript automatically chooses architecture on x64 (see R Installation and Administration, 2.6 Sub-architectures for details)
• Rscript needs options(echo=TRUE) in the .R file if you want to write the commands to the output file

Solution 2:

A few points:

1. Command-line parameters are accessible via commandArgs(), so see help(commandArgs) for an overview.

2. You can use Rscript.exe on all platforms, including Windows. It will support commandArgs(). littler could be ported to Windows but lives right now only on OS X and Linux.

3. There are two add-on packages on CRAN -- getopt and optparse -- which were both written for command-line parsing.

Edit in Nov 2015: New alternatives have appeared and I wholeheartedly recommend docopt.