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

Question

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

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.

Add this to the top of your script:

args<-commandArgs(TRUE)

Then you can refer to the arguments passed as args[1], args[2] etc.

Then run

Rscript myscript.R arg1 arg2 arg3

If your args are strings with spaces in them, enclose within double quotes.

Try library(getopt) ... if you want things to be nicer. For example:

spec <- matrix(c(
        'in'     , 'i', 1, "character", "file from fastq-stats -x (required)",
        'gc'     , 'g', 1, "character", "input gc content file (optional)",
        'out'    , 'o', 1, "character", "output filename (optional)",
        'help'   , 'h', 0, "logical",   "this help"
),ncol=5,byrow=T)

opt = getopt(spec);

if (!is.null(opt$help) || is.null(opt$in)) {
    cat(paste(getopt(spec, usage=T),"\n"));
    q();
}

Since optparse has been mentioned a couple of times in the answers, and it provides a comprehensive kit for command line processing, here's a short simplified example of how you can use it, assuming the input file exists:

script.R:

library(optparse)

option_list <- list(
  make_option(c("-n", "--count_lines"), action="store_true", default=FALSE,
    help="Count the line numbers [default]"),
  make_option(c("-f", "--factor"), type="integer", default=3,
    help="Multiply output by this number [default %default]")
)

parser <- OptionParser(usage="%prog [options] file", option_list=option_list)

args <- parse_args(parser, positional_arguments = 1)
opt <- args$options
file <- args$args

if(opt$count_lines) {
  print(paste(length(readLines(file)) * opt$factor))
}

Given an arbitrary file blah.txt with 23 lines.

On the command line:

Rscript script.R -h outputs

Usage: script.R [options] file


Options:
        -n, --count_lines
                Count the line numbers [default]

        -f FACTOR, --factor=FACTOR
                Multiply output by this number [default 3]

        -h, --help
                Show this help message and exit

Rscript script.R -n blah.txt outputs [1] "69"

Rscript script.R -n -f 5 blah.txt outputs [1] "115"

you need littler (pronounced 'little r')

Dirk will be by in about 15 minutes to elaborate ;)

In bash, you can construct a command line like the following:

$ z=10
$ echo $z
10
$ Rscript -e "args<-commandArgs(TRUE);x=args[1]:args[2];x;mean(x);sd(x)" 1 $z
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10
[1] 5.5
[1] 3.027650
$

You can see that the variable $z is substituted by bash shell with "10" and this value is picked up by commandArgs and fed into args[2], and the range command x=1:10 executed by R successfully, etc etc.