If you want to routinely apply an R analysis to a lot of separate data files, or provide a repeatable analysis method to other people, an executable R script is a user-friendly way to do so. Instead of you or your user having to call R
and execute your script inside R via source(.)
or a function call, your user may simply call the script itself as if it was a program.
To represent the standard input-/output channels, use the functions file("stdin")
(input from terminal or other program via pipe), stdout()
(standard output) and stderr()
(standard error). Note that while there is the function stdin()
, it can not be used when supplying a ready-made script to R, because it will read the next lines of that script instead of user input.