How to Use System Commands in your R Script or Package

Have you ever found a command-line tool that’s perfect for getting your job done, and wanted to use it from an R script or package? E.g. some sort of scientific software providing a specific functionality made available though a command-line interface (CLI)? In this post, we have a look at a few options for writing such CLI wrappers in R. In particular, we compare the base R functions system() and system2(), the sys package and the processx …