littler 0.3.23 on CRAN: More Features (and Fixes)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 07:37:00 CDT

The twentythird release of littler as a CRAN package landed on CRAN just now, following in the now twenty year history (!!) as a (initially non-CRAN) package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only began to do in later years.

littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to some-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default were a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet – the build system could be extended – see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH. A few examples are highlighted at the Github repo:, as well as in the examples vignette.

This release, the first in about eleven months, once again brings two new helper scripts, and enhances six existing one. The release was triggered because it finally became clear why installGitHub.r ignored r2u when available: we forced the type argument to ‘source’ (so thanks to Iñaki for spotting this). One change was once again contributed by Michael which is again greatly appreciated.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.22 (2026-02-03)

Changes in examples scripts

A new script busybees.r aggregates deadlined packages by maintainer

Several small updated have been made to the (mostly internal) 'r2u.r' script

The deadliners.r script has refined treatment for screen width

The install2.r script has new options --quiet and --verbose as proposed by Zivan Karaman

The rcc.r script passes build-args to 'rcmdcheck' to compact vignettes and save data

The installRub.r script now defaults to 'noble' and is more tolerant of inputs

The installRub.r script deals correctly with empty utils::osVersion thanks to Michael Chirico

New script checkPackageUrls.r inspired by how CRAN checks (with thanks to Kurt Hornik for the hint)

The installGithub.r script now adjusts to bspm and takes advantage of r2u binaries for its build dependencies

Changes in package

Environment variables (read at build time) can use double quotes

Continuous intgegration scripts received a minor update

My CRANberries service provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page, and also on the package docs website. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs and now of course also from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). Binary packages are available directly in Debian as well as (in a day or two) Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter. Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.