Question

Is it possible to set a flag in the R CMD build ... command which specifies the destination folder for the tar.gz file?

I have looked pretty closely at the R CMD --help and cannot see it – but i may be missing something.

Answer 1

The normal way to do this would be to cd to the destination folder and run R CMD build foo from there. E.g. sources are in ~/pkgsrcs/foo and you want tar.gz to be in ~/pkgbuild/foo then:

cd ~/pkgbuild/foo
R CMD build ~/pkgsrcs/foo

will result in foo_version.tar.gz in ~/pkgsrcs/foo.