Load multiple packages at once

How can I load a bunch of packages at once with out retyping the require command over and over? I've tried three approaches all of which crash and burn.

Basically, I want to supply a vector of package names to a function that will load them.

x<-c("plyr", "psych", "tm")

require(x)
lapply(x, require)
do.call("require", x)

Several permutations of your proposed functions do work -- but only if you specify the character.only argument to be TRUE. Quick example:

lapply(x, require, character.only = TRUE)

The CRAN package pacman that I maintain (authored with Dason Kurkiewicz) can accomplish this:

So the user could do:

## install.packages("pacman")
pacman::p_load(dplyr, psych, tm) 

and if the package is missing p_load will download it from CRAN or Bioconductor.

This should do the trick:

lapply(x, FUN = function(X) {
    do.call("require", list(X)) 
})

(The key bit is that the args argument in do.call(what, args) must be a list --- even if it only has a single element!)