A bash shell script that can be used to turn the current directory into an RStudio project, opening the project in RStudio after creating it.

mkrproj.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Usage: mkproj [projectname]
# projectname defaults to name of current directory

template="Version: 1.0

RestoreWorkspace: No
SaveWorkspace: No
AlwaysSaveHistory: Yes

EnableCodeIndexing: Yes
UseSpacesForTab: Yes
NumSpacesForTab: 2
Encoding: UTF-8

RnwWeave: knitr
LaTeX: XeLaTeX

AutoAppendNewline: Yes
StripTrailingWhitespace: Yes

QuitChildProcessesOnExit: Yes
"

gtemplate=".Rproj.user
.Rhistory
.RData
.Ruserdata
"

wd=$(basename "`pwd`")

if [ -z $1 ]; then
  projectname=$wd
else
  projectname=$1
fi

count=`ls -1 *.Rproj 2>/dev/null | wc -l`
if [ $count == 0 ]
then
  echo "${template}" > "${projectname}.Rproj"
fi

if [ ! -e .gitignore ]
then
    echo "${gtemplate}" > .gitignore
fi



# Open the newly created project in RStudio:
open "${projectname}.Rproj"

I had to change the last line to rstudio "${projectname}.Rproj" or I got an error:

Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console