R: Read a DESCRIPTION file

desc {desc} | R Documentation

## Read a DESCRIPTION file

### Description

This is a convenience wrapper for `description$new()`. Very often you want to read an existing `DESCRIPTION` file, and to do this you can just supply the path to the file or its directory to `desc()`.

### Usage

    desc(cmd = NULL, file = NULL, text = NULL, package = NULL)

### Arguments

`cmd` | A command to create a description from scratch. Currently only `"!new"` is implemented. If it does not start with an exclamation mark, it will be interpreted as the ‘file’ argument.
`file` | Name of the `DESCRIPTION` file to load. If all of ‘cmd’, ‘file’ and ‘text’ are `NULL` (the default), then the `DESCRIPTION` file in the current working directory is used. The file can also be an R package (source, or binary), in which case the DESCRIPTION file is extracted from it, but note that in this case `$write()` cannot write the file back in the package archive.
`text` | A character scalar containing the full DESCRIPTION. Character vectors are collapsed into a character scalar, with newline as the separator.
`package` | If not NULL, then the name of an installed package and the DESCRIPTION file of this package will be loaded.

### Examples

    desc(package = "desc")
    DESCRIPTION <- system.file("DESCRIPTION", package = "desc")
    desc(DESCRIPTION)

[Package desc version 1.1.0 Index]