It may not be the nicest of all possible solutions but has some practical value for me. You can cat a script through sed and into R. From the Unix shell you can do: echo 'cat(file=SOMEFILENAME,"hello world")' | \ sed -e 's/SOMEFILENAME/"hello.txt"/' | /usr/bin/R > /dev/null The "echo" is the UNIX command, the "cat" is the R function. If you need the output then one can redirect it to some file. commandArgs would do for the example above and for most other cases, I personally find the above easier as it does not require argument parsing and it has some particular charm when combined with Makefiles. But commandArgs is the way to do it right, I am afraid. Best regards Steffen Am Montag 10 April 2006 18:43 schrieb Weiwei Shi: > You can also try this way: > arg_variable1 = arg1 > export arg_variable1 > in linux command and then get them by using the following in R: > arg1 <- Sys.getenv("arg_variable1") > > HTH, > > weiwei > > On 4/10/06, D.Enrique ESCOBAR ESPINOZA <escobarebio at="" yahoo.com=""> wrote: > > anyone knows how to use > > arguments in R, > > I use linux and the comand line only... > > i would like to pass arguments in R like we do in perl > > ex= perl myProgram.pl arg1 arg2 ... argn