The original R-GRASS interface (Bivand 2000; Neteler and Mitasova 2008) was written mainly to permit R objects represented as sp class objects to be moved to GRASS, and GRASS objects to be moved to R for statistical analysis. From spgrass6 0.6-3 (April 2009) following a fruitful workshop at Queen’s University, Belfast, the interface was re-written to use the --interface-description flag provided for each GRASS command, also used by the Python interface to GRASS commands. Command interface descriptions are parsed from XML and cached as R objects for efficiency. The current version of the R-GRASS interface is contained in this package, rgrass. In addition, an R function initGRASS() was written to permit GRASS to be started from within GRASS to which we will return below.
When starting GRASS GIS from a terminal console (here GRASS 8.2.0), one can continue in the GRASS terminal console, starting an interactive R session from there (here R 4.2.1). Loading and attaching the R-GRASS interface package rgrass in the R session, we see that the current GRASS location is detected and reported:
$ /home/rsb/topics/grass/g820/bin/grass /home/rsb/topics/grassdata/nc_basic_spm_grass7/rsb
Starting GRASS GIS...
Cleaning up temporary files...
__________ ___ __________ _______________
/ ____/ __ \/ | / ___/ ___/ / ____/ _/ ___/
/ / __/ /_/ / /| | \__ \\_ \ / / __ / / \__ \
/ /_/ / _, _/ ___ |___/ /__/ / / /_/ // / ___/ /
\____/_/ |_/_/ |_/____/____/ \____/___//____/
Welcome to GRASS GIS 8.2.0
GRASS GIS homepage: https://grass.osgeo.org
This version running through: Bash Shell (/bin/bash)
Help is available with the command: g.manual -i
See the licence terms with: g.version -c
See citation options with: g.version -x
If required, restart the GUI with: g.gui wxpython
When ready to quit enter: exit
Launching <wxpython> GUI in the background, please wait...
GRASS nc_basic_spm_grass7/rsb:github-rsb