Reading stdin from a pipe for command-line R shenanigans

I think I rely on command-line tomfoolery a little bit too much. Today I wanted to pipe some data into R and have the commands to run defined on the command line as well. This is the kind of thing I do with Perl or bash to get some quick answers and I'd love to add R to the repertoire.

So, I tried a number of things all of which failed. This is how I got it to work for me:

> perl -le 'printf "%.4f\t%.4f\n", rand(), rand() for 1 .. 20' \
 | R --vanilla --slave -e\
 "data=read.delim(pipe('cat /dev/stdin'), header=F);\
  cor.test(data\$V1, data\$V2)"

You have to remember to escape any special characters in the R script ($ in this case).