suggestion for "2.7.2 shell scripts"

[r2evans]

Nice book! Thanks for writing and publishing it. I'll grab a paper copy but likely refer to the electronic version more for easier searching.

In section "2.7.2 Shell Scripts", you suggest that Windows users can get the required functionality by installing Cygwin or WSL. I suggest that both require a bit more technical investment than is available and/or strictly necessary (not to mention large installations).

For the faint-of-heart (or space-limited), you can get most (admittedly) functionality out of Git for Windows, as it contains bash, awk/sed/tr, bzip2/bunzip2/unzip (but not zip!), git/diff/patch, grep/sort/uniq/wc, find/file/xargs, and many others. Two other alternatives (I have not tested them) are Gnu on Windows ("the lightweight alternative to Cygwin") and, in a pinch, even Rtools includes sh and a few of the above commands.

It's perhaps easier to push for GfW since RStudio already incorporates a bunch of git integration, so this would be a logical step (and a fluid endorsement of it in the book).

[yihui]

Very good suggestion! I'll try to provide more information for Windows users. If you or anyone can submit a pull request, that will be even better! Thanks!