syntax error near unexpected token in script scraping Tweets

Question

I've got an R script that works fine on its own to scrape tweets using the twitteR package. But when I try to automate this script on my mac using the crontab command, I get this error message:

/Users/Simon/WLU/projects_folder/ON18/get_tweets.R: line 1: syntax error near 
unexpected token `twitteR'
/Users/Simon/WLU/projects_folder/ON18/get_tweets.R: line 1: `library(twitteR)'

Do I need to add a #/usr/bash command or something like that to initialize the R script?

library(twitteR)
options(httr_oauth_cache=T)
consumer_key<-'yYol52znZBdtxnwQFpekMyCek'
consumer_secret<-'UMo8h70zYtrd5HSnjCGw1hnG88kfPmvu1wWxL1VvPWVYwpguu6'
access_token<-'1102181509-5hBh8OE7Ehz5NhWVBqpk1olp1dOmWiIK5B9ypzy'
access_token_secret<-'XbYZYWuMGHT5wCDzvDsDHMX3wI5KDzBJ9NQsh1Jj6I'
setup_twitter_oauth(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, 
access_token_secret)

#Get #onpoli tweet
onpoli<-searchTwitter('#onpoli', resultType='recent', n=200)
#Get pcoldr
pcpoldr<-searchTwitter('#pcpoldr', resultType='recent', n=200)
#Get PCPO tweets
pcpo<-searchTwitter('#pcpo', resultType='recent', n=200)
#Turn to data.frames
onpolidf<-twListToDF(onpoli)
pcpoldrdf<-twListToDF(pcpoldr)
pcpodf<-twListToDF(pcpo)
#Write out to .csv files 
write.csv(onpolidf, './Tweets/onpoli.csv', append=T)
write.csv(pcpoldrdf, './Tweets/pcpoldr.csv', append=T)
write.csv(pcpodf, './Tweets/pcpo.csv', append=T)
quite(save='no')

miken32 · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-18 01:10:03Z

1

You need to provide cron with something executable to run. Even if the script is marked executable, in the absence of a shebang, it will not know how to execute this file. Instead, the shell will try and run it as a shell script. This results in a syntax error.

Easiest is to call Rscript, passing it the script name:

5 0 * * * Rscript /Users/Simon/WLU/projects_folder/ON18/get_tweets.R

Or you can make the script itself executable:

chmod +x /Users/Simon/WLU/projects_folder/ON18/get_tweets.R

Add a shebang:

#!/usr/bin/env Rscript

And call the script directly:

5 0 * * * /Users/Simon/WLU/projects_folder/ON18/get_tweets.R

answered Feb 18, 2018 at 1:10

miken32

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spindoctor · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-18 01:19:48Z

0

Thanks for this. Actually it turned out that it couldn't find rscript. So I had to modify it to read /usr/local/bin/Rscript /Users/Simon/WLU/projects_folder/ON18/get_tweets.R

I've seen this solution elsewhere. Apparently if I get around to re-installing R it will work.

Should I mark this solved somehow?

answered Feb 18, 2018 at 1:19

spindoctor

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2 Comments

miken32 Over a year ago

You should upvote all answers that were helpful, and mark accepted the one answer that best answered your question. This will mark the question as "closed," and give you some reputation on the site. See stackoverflow.com/help/someone-answers for more information.

miken32 Over a year ago

(This includes your own answers by the way. If you figured out the answer yourself, give yourself the check mark!)

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