Why (or when) is Rscript (or littler) better than R CMD BATCH?

Question

I am automating some webscraping with R in cron and sometimes I use R CMD BATCH and sometimes I use Rscript.

To

Answer 1

From what I understand:

R CMD BATCH:

• echo the input statements
• can not output to stdout

Rscript:

• does NOT echo
• output to stdout
• can be used in one-liner (i.e. with no input file)

littler:

• all that Rscript does
• can read commands from stdin (useful for pipelining)
• faster startup time
• load the methods package