R: Utilities for Building and Checking Add-on Packages

PkgUtils {utils} | R Documentation

## Utilities for Building and Checking Add-on Packages

### Description

Utilities for checking whether the sources of an R add-on package work correctly, and for building a source package from them.

### Usage

    R CMD check [options] pkgdirs
    R CMD build [options] pkgdirs

### Arguments

`pkgdirs` | a list of names of directories with sources of R add-on packages. For `check` these can also be the filenames of compressed `tar` archives with extension ‘.tar.gz’, ‘.tgz’, ‘.tar.bz2’ or ‘.tar.xz’.
`options` | further options to control the processing, or for obtaining information about usage and version of the utility.

### Details

`R CMD check` checks R add-on packages from their sources, performing a wide variety of diagnostic checks.

`R CMD build` builds R source tarballs. The name(s) of the packages are taken from the ‘DESCRIPTION’ files and not from the directory names. This works entirely on a copy of the supplied source directories.

Use `R CMD foo --help` to obtain usage information on utility `foo`.

The defaults for some of the options to `R CMD build` can be set by environment variables _R_BUILD_RESAVE_DATA_ and _R_BUILD_COMPACT_VIGNETTES_: see ‘Writing R Extensions’. Many of the checks in `R CMD check` can be turned off or on by environment variables: see Chapter 6 of the ‘R Internals’ manual.

By default `R CMD build` uses the `"internal"` option to `tar` to prepare the tarball. An external `tar` program can be specified by the R_BUILD_TAR environment variable. This may be substantially faster for very large packages, and can be needed for packages with long path names (over 100 bytes) or very large files (over 8GB): however, the resulting tarball may not be portable.

`R CMD check` by default unpacks tarballs by the internal `untar` function: if needed an external `tar` command can be specified by the environment variable R_INSTALL_TAR: please ensure that it can handle the type of compression used on the tarball. (This is sometimes needed for tarballs containing invalid or unsupported sections, and can be faster on very large tarballs. Setting R_INSTALL_TAR to tar.exe has been needed to overcome permissions issues on some Windows systems.)

### Note

They make use of a temporary directory specified by the environment variable `TMPDIR` and defaulting to c:/TEMP. Do ensure that if set forward slashes are used.

### See Also

The sections on “Checking and building packages” and “Processing Rd format” in “Writing R Extensions” (see the Manuals sub-menu of the Help menu on the console).

[Package utils version 3.5.1 Index]