On UNIX one can use #! notation. It would be nice to be able to do something similar on Windows.
This could be done by giving Rscript the capability of skipping over the first few lines. For example, there might be a --skip=n argument or perhaps Rscript would skip over any consecutive leading lines that begin with @ in the R file since that cannot be syntactically correct R but does have meaning to Windows batch, namely, it means do not display the line beginning with @ (but still run it). For example, if we implement the @ idea then a sample 3 line file called grep.bat might look like this: @Rscript grep.bat %1 for(L in grep(commandArgs(TRUE), readLines(file("stdin")), value = TRUE)) cat(L, "\n", sep = "") and then we would run it as a Windows batch file like this from the Windows console to find all lines with the word target: grep target < myfile.txt or if we implemented --skip it might look like this: @Rscript --skip=1 grep.bat %1 for(L in grep(commandArgs(TRUE), readLines(file("stdin")), value = TRUE)) cat(L, "\n", sep = "") ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel