Commandline Arguments in R are null - r

Question

I'm coding in R.
I thought I was making pretty good progress in R. I had created a script that read the command line arguments (there was 1 single argument, it was the name of a data file), read in data from a .csv, performed a regression and printed some data.
Somewhere along the way, I modified something and everything went out the window. Subsequently, I have torn down my entire script and I now have the most basic script and it is behaving strangely. Here is what I've got now:
#NOTE: To run the script use the following command in terminal R CMD
#BATCH scriptname arguments #store the current directory
initial.dir<-getwd()
#set the output
sink("PROGOUT.out")
#Get commandline arguments
args<-commandArgs(trailingOnly=TRUE)
print(args)
"HELLO WORLD"
I expected this program to create a file, PROGOUT.out, that contains the commandline arguments and the phrase HELLO WORLD.
At the command prompt I ran,
$ R CMD BATCH R_ScriptV3.R test1 test2 test3 test4
The program creates two files, 'test1' and 'PROGOUT.out'
This is the contents of PROGOUT.out:
character(0)
[1] "HELLO WORLD"
proc.time() user system elapsed 0.201 0.026 0.219
This is the contents of test1:
R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31) -- "Pumpkin Helmet" Copyright (C) 2014 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit) R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details. Natural language support but running in an English locale R is a collaborative project with many contributors. Type 'contributors()' for more information and 'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications. Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or 'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help. Type 'q()' to quit R. [Previously saved workspace restored] >
NOTE: To run the script use the following command in terminal
R CMD BATCH scriptname arguments > > #store the current directory
initial.dir<-getwd()
set the output
sink("PROGOUT.out")
Get commandline arguments
args<-commandArgs(trailingOnly=TRUE)
print(args)
"HELLO WORLD" >
So... 1) why did the program create the file 'test1'? This wasn't happening when I started scripting but it appears the first argument in the command prompt becomes a file with some header information and a copy of the program?, 2) PROGOUT.out does contain the 'HELLO WORLD' statement but it does NOT contain any other arguments .... why not and how do I read those arguments into my script.
I could have SWORN this was all working just fine before. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You're looking for Rscript:
Rscript R_ScriptV3.R test1 test2 test3 test4
The params of R CMD BATCH work differently:
R CMD BATCH '--args test1 test2 test3 test4' R_ScriptV3.R output.Rout