Why (or when) is Rscript (or littler) better than R CMD BATCH?

Question

I am automating some webscraping with R in cron and sometimes I use R CMD BATCH and sometimes I use Rscript.

To decide which one to use I mainly focus if I want the .Rout file or not.

But reading the answers to some questions here in SO (like this or this) it seems that Rscript is preferred to R CMD BATCH.

So my questions are:

• Besides the fact that the syntax is a little different and R CMD BATCH saves an .Rout file while Rscript does not, what are the main differences between the two of them?

• When should I prefer one over another? More specifically, in the cron job above mentioned, is one of them preferred?

• I have not used yet littler, how is it different from both Rscript and R CMD BATCH?

Answer 1

From what I understand:

R CMD BATCH:

• echo the input statements
• can not output to stdout

Rscript:

• does NOT echo
• output to stdout
• can be used in one-liner (i.e. with no input file)

littler:

• all that Rscript does
• can read commands from stdin (useful for pipelining)
• faster startup time
• load the methods package