Running shell command (Rmarkdown::render) every save

Question

I am trying to autogenerate an output every time I save the file with :update or with :w. This is what I got so far:

augroup renderRmd | au!
    autocmd BufWritePost *.rmd !'Rscript -e "rmarkdown::render(<afile>:p:S)"'
augroup end

But I get:

:!'Rscript -e "rmarkdown::render('/home/luis/Documents/2020-CamCAN/src/2021-09-1
8-time-series.rmd')"'
zsh:1: no such file or directory: Rscript -e "rmarkdown::render(/home/luis/Docum
ents/2020-CamCAN/src/2021-09-18-time-series.rmd)"

Running Rscript -e "rmarkdown::render('/home/luis/Documents/2020-CamCAN/src/2021-09-1 8-time-series.rmd')" in zsh works as expected. I feel like this is something with the expansion of the name, but I can´t figure it out.

Also, it does not work with :update, only with :w

extra points if this is run asynchronously from Vim, or some kind of run in the background.

Answer 1

With https://github.com/tpope/vim-dispatch installed, I would do something like the following

" with appropriate augroup, of course
autocmd BufWritePost *.Rmd Dispatch Rscript -e "rmarkdown::render(<afile>:p:S)"

You could use other commands from that plugin depending on how background/foreground you want the command.

Answer 2

Although an async alternative would be better, this one is pretty neat. The problem as comments pointed out was the quotes.

augroup renderRmd | au!
    autocmd BufWritePost *.Rmd call Render()
  augroup end


function! Render() abort
  :tabnew | te Rscript -e "rmarkdown::render(<afile>:p:S)"
  :tabprev
endfunction

This works with :w and generates the output correctly, while leaving the terminal in a tab/buffer in the background.