making commandargs comma delimited or parsing spaces

Question

I\'m trying to run R from the command line using command line arguments. This includes passing in some filepaths as arguments for use inside the script. It all works most of

Answer 1

Using eval(parse()) is probably not the best and most efficient way to parse command line arguments. I recommend to use a package like the optparse to do the parsing for you. Parsing command line args has already been solved, no need to reimplement this. I could imagine that this solves your problems. Although, spaces in path names are a bad idea to begin with.

Alternatively, you could take a very simple approach and pass the arguments like this:

R CMD BATCH --slave arg1 arg2

Where you can retrieve them like:

ca = commandArgs(TRUE)
arg1 = ca[2]
arg2 = ca[3]

This avoids the eval(parse which I think is causing the issues. Finally, you could try and escape the space like this:

R CMD BATCH --slave "C:/spam\ bla"

You could also give Rscript a try, R CMD BATCH seems to be less favored than Rscript.