[r] Passing command line arguments to R CMD BATCH

I have been using R CMD BATCH my_script.R from a terminal to execute an R script. I am now at the point where I would like to pass an argument to the command, but am having some issues getting it working. If I do R CMD BATCH my_script.R blabla then blabla becomes the output file, rather than being interpreted as an argument available to the R script being executed.

I have tried Rscript my_script.R blabla which seems to pass on blabla correctly as an argument, but then I don't get the my_script.Rout output file that I get with R CMD BATCH (I want the .Rout file). While I could redirect the output of a call to Rscript to a file name of my choosing, I would not be getting the R input commands included in the file in the way R CMD BATCH does in the .Rout file.

So, ideally, I'm after a way to pass arguments to an R script being executed via the R CMD BATCH method, though would be happy with an approach using Rscript if there is a way to make it produce a comparable .Rout file.

After trying the options described here, I found this post from Forester in r-bloggers . I think it is a clean option to consider.

I put his code here:

From command line

$ R CMD BATCH --no-save --no-restore '--args a=1 b=c(2,5,6)' test.R test.out &

Test.R

##First read in the arguments listed at the command line
args=(commandArgs(TRUE))

##args is now a list of character vectors
## First check to see if arguments are passed.
## Then cycle through each element of the list and evaluate the expressions.
if(length(args)==0){
    print("No arguments supplied.")
    ##supply default values
    a = 1
    b = c(1,1,1)
}else{
    for(i in 1:length(args)){
      eval(parse(text=args[[i]]))
    }
}

print(a*2)
print(b*3)

In test.out

> print(a*2)
[1] 2
> print(b*3)
[1]  6 15 18

Thanks to Forester!

Here's another way to process command line args, using R CMD BATCH. My approach, which builds on an earlier answer here, lets you specify arguments at the command line and, in your R script, give some or all of them default values.

Here's an R file, which I name test.R:

defaults <- list(a=1, b=c(1,1,1)) ## default values of any arguments we might pass

## parse each command arg, loading it into global environment
for (arg in commandArgs(TRUE))
  eval(parse(text=arg))

## if any variable named in defaults doesn't exist, then create it
## with value from defaults
for (nm in names(defaults))
  assign(nm, mget(nm, ifnotfound=list(defaults[[nm]]))[[1]])

print(a)
print(b)

At the command line, if I type

R CMD BATCH --no-save --no-restore '--args a=2 b=c(2,5,6)' test.R

then within R we'll have a = 2 and b = c(2,5,6). But I could, say, omit b, and add in another argument c:

R CMD BATCH --no-save --no-restore '--args a=2 c="hello"' test.R

Then in R we'll have a = 2, b = c(1,1,1) (the default), and c = "hello".

Finally, for convenience we can wrap the R code in a function, as long as we're careful about the environment:

## defaults should be either NULL or a named list
parseCommandArgs <- function(defaults=NULL, envir=globalenv()) {
  for (arg in commandArgs(TRUE))
    eval(parse(text=arg), envir=envir)

  for (nm in names(defaults))
    assign(nm, mget(nm, ifnotfound=list(defaults[[nm]]), envir=envir)[[1]], pos=envir)
}

## example usage:
parseCommandArgs(list(a=1, b=c(1,1,1)))

In your R script, called test.R:

args <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = F)
myargument <- args[length(args)]
myargument <- sub("-","",myargument)
print(myargument)
q(save="no")

From the command line run:

R CMD BATCH -4 test.R

Your output file, test.Rout, will show that the argument 4 has been successfully passed to R:

cat test.Rout

> args <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = F)
> myargument <- args[length(args)]
> myargument <- sub("-","",myargument)
> print(myargument)
[1] "4"
> q(save="no")
> proc.time()
user  system elapsed 
0.222   0.022   0.236 

You need to put arguments before my_script.R and use - on the arguments, e.g.

R CMD BATCH -blabla my_script.R

commandArgs() will receive -blabla as a character string in this case. See the help for details:

$ R CMD BATCH --help
Usage: R CMD BATCH [options] infile [outfile]

Run R non-interactively with input from infile and place output (stdout
and stderr) to another file.  If not given, the name of the output file
is the one of the input file, with a possible '.R' extension stripped,
and '.Rout' appended.

Options:
  -h, --help        print short help message and exit
  -v, --version     print version info and exit
  --no-timing           do not report the timings
  --            end processing of options

Further arguments starting with a '-' are considered as options as long
as '--' was not encountered, and are passed on to the R process, which
by default is started with '--restore --save --no-readline'.
See also help('BATCH') inside R.

My impression is that R CMD BATCH is a bit of a relict. In any case, the more recent Rscript executable (available on all platforms), together with commandArgs() makes processing command line arguments pretty easy.

As an example, here is a little script -- call it "myScript.R":

## myScript.R
args <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE)
rnorm(n=as.numeric(args[1]), mean=as.numeric(args[2]))

And here is what invoking it from the command line looks like

> Rscript myScript.R 5 100
[1]  98.46435 100.04626  99.44937  98.52910 100.78853

Edit:

Not that I'd recommend it, but ... using a combination of source() and sink(), you could get Rscript to produce an .Rout file like that produced by R CMD BATCH. One way would be to create a little R script -- call it RscriptEcho.R -- which you call directly with Rscript. It might look like this:

## RscriptEcho.R
args <- commandArgs(TRUE)
srcFile <- args[1]
outFile <- paste0(make.names(date()), ".Rout")
args <- args[-1]

sink(outFile, split = TRUE)
source(srcFile, echo = TRUE)

To execute your actual script, you would then do:

Rscript RscriptEcho.R myScript.R 5 100
[1]  98.46435 100.04626  99.44937  98.52910 100.78853

which will execute myScript.R with the supplied arguments and sink interleaved input, output, and messages to a uniquely named .Rout.

Edit2:
You can run Rscript verbosely and place the verbose output in a file.

Rscript --verbose myScript.R 5 100 > myScript.Rout

I add an answer because I think a one line solution is always good! Atop of your myRscript.R file, add the following line:

eval(parse(text=paste(commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE), collapse=";")))

Then submit your script with something like:

R CMD BATCH [options] '--args arguments you want to supply' myRscript.R &

For example:

R CMD BATCH --vanilla '--args N=1 l=list(a=2, b="test") name="aname"' myscript.R &

Then:

> ls()
[1] "N"    "l"    "name"