What's the best way to use R scripts on the command line (terminal)?

Question

Content of script.r:

#!/usr/bin/env Rscript

args = commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE)
message(sprintf("Hello %s", args[1L]))

The first line is the shebang line. It’s best practice to use /usr/bin/env Rscript instead of hard-coding the path to your R installation. Otherwise you risk your script breaking on other computers.

Next, make it executable (on the command line):

chmod +x script.r

Invocation from command line:

./script.r world
# Hello world

Try littler. littler provides hash-bang (i.e. script starting with #!/some/path) capability for GNU R, as well as simple command-line and piping use.

Miguel Sanchez's response is the way it should be. The other way executing Rscript could be 'env' command to run the system wide RScript.

#!/usr/bin/env Rscript

#!/path/to/R won't work because R is itself a script, so execve is unhappy.

I use R --slave -f script

If you are interested in parsing command line arguments to an R script try RScript which is bundled with R as of version 2.5.x

http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/utils/html/Rscript.html

This works,

#!/usr/bin/Rscript

but I don't know what happens if you have more than 1 version of R installed on your machine.

If you do it like this

#!/usr/bin/env Rscript

it tells the interpreter to just use whatever R appears first on your path.