Running R via terminal in Windows and leaving R session open

Question

Suppose that I have a R script called test.R, stored at C:\, with the following content:

x <- "Hello Stackoverflowers"
print(x)

To run it via terminal one could simply call:

Rscript C:\test.R

And as expected, the result will be:

However, what I wonder is whether there is a way to run test.R via Windows console but after that staying within the executed R session instead of closing and going back to the console cursor? That is, staying inside the R session instead of going back, in the image above, to C:\R\R-3.4.1\bin>.

For instance, when compiling Python code with python.exe I can easily accomplish a similar thing by passing the -i parameter to the python.execall.

How could I do that with R?

Answer 1

Add this to your .Rprofile:

STARTUP_FILE <- Sys.getenv("STARTUP_FILE")
if (file.exsts(STARTUP_FILE)) source(STARTUP_FILE) 

and then set the indicated environment variable outside of R and then run R. e.g. from the Windows cmd line:

set STARTUP_FILE=C:\test.R
R
... R session ...
q()

Variations

There are many variations of this. For example, we could make a copy of the .Rprofile file in a specific directory such as ~/test, say, and add this code to that copy

source("~/test/test.R")

in which case R would only run test.R if R were started in that directory.