Schedule R Script Using Cron

Schedule a Rscript crontab everyminute

I can see the dreaded smart quotes in your cron entry. This often happens when you copy-paste from word processors. Backspace over those abominations and re-type normal quotes. Change:

* * * * * Rscript “/Users/Home/Desktop/David Studios/Scraper/compiler.R”

* * * * * Rscript "/Users/Home/Desktop/David Studios/Scraper/compiler.R"

See the difference? It's subtle and easy to miss.

Update:

I see you've made the above change and it's still not working for you. Verify that Rscript is in the $PATH environment variable for the user that owns this crontab. Alternatively, you can simply specify the fully qualified path to Rscript directly in the cron entry. You can find that quickly on the command line with the following command:

which Rscript

Update #2:

I see by your comments that the fully qualified path to Rscript is /usr/local/bin/Rscript. I'm guessing /usr/local/bin is not in the path for the user who owns this crontab. Try using the fully qualified path, like this:

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/Rscript "/Users/Home/Desktop/David Studios/Scraper/compiler.R"

Cant schedule R script with cron

cron is still supported by OSX but it has been deprecated in launchd.

You need to create a "plist" file and place it in folder ~/Library/LaunchAgents. Example plist file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"><plist version="1.0">  <dict>    <key>Label</key>    <string>example</string>    <key>ProgramArguments</key>    <array>      <string>Rscript /path/to/example.R</string>    </array>    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>    <dict>      <key>Minute</key>      <integer>0</integer>      <key>Hour</key>      <integer>23</integer>    </dict>  </dict></plist>

Schedule R script using cron

Consider these tips

Use Rscript (or littler) rather than R CMD BATCH
Make sure the cron job is running as you
Make sure the script runs by itself
Test it a few times in verbose mode

My box is running the somewhat visible CRANberries via a cronjob calling an R script
(which I execute via littler but Rscript
should work just as well). For this, the entry in /etc/crontab on my Ubuntu server is

# every few hours, run cranberries
16 */3 * * *    edd     cd /home/edd/cranberries && ./cranberries.r

so every sixteen minutes past every third hour, a shell command is being run with my id. It changes into the working directory, and call the R script (which has executable modes etc).

Looking at this, I could actually just run the script and have setwd() command in it....

How to schedule an R Script Cronjob in a linux server?

The following cron job will run Rscript scriptSecos.R from the path /home/script2, once a day, at 0:00 (midnight).

0 0 * * * cd /home/script2; Rscript scriptSecos.R >/dev/null 2>&1

If you want to save the output of the script to a file, change >/dev/null with >/path/to/file.

You can copy and paste this cronjob in your crontab file (You can open the file by using command crontab –e)

Run cron job within RStudio

Thank you Dirk.
Yes I did add already #!/usr/bin/Rscript to my script.
The problem actually came from the simple fact that some libraries were not loaded in my script, causing errors and stopping the script.
Now that all the libraries are loaded, it is working fine!