Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.3.23 on CRAN: Mostly Internal Fixes

The twentyfourth release of littler as a
CRAN package
landed on CRAN just now, following in the now twenty-one 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, which comes just two months after the previous 0.3.22
release that brought a few new features, is mostly internal. (The
previous release erroneously had 0.3.23 in its blog and social media
posts, it really was 0.3.22 and this one now is is 0.3.23.) Mattias
Ellert address a nag (when building for a distribution) about one
example file with a shebang not have excutable modes. I accommodated the
ever-changing interface the C API of R (within about twelve hours of
being notified). A few other smaller changes were made as well polishing
a script or two or usual, see below for more.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler
version 0.3.23 (2026-04-12)

• Changes in examples scripts

  • Correct spelling in installGithub.r to lower-case
    h

  • The r2u.r now recognises ‘resolute’ aka
    26.06

  • installRub.r can install (more easily) from
    r-multiverse

  • A file permission was corrected (Mattias Ellert in #131)

• Changes in package

  • Update script count and examples in README.md

  • Continuous intgegration scripts received minor updates

  • The C level access to the R API was updated to reflect most
    recent standards (Dirk in #132)

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. You can also sponsor my Tour
de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.