Direct mail is a broad term that includes the following types of mailed promotions: Institutional direct mail serves to promote the name of the publishing house with no reasonable expectation of sales revenues.
touch (Unix) touch is a standard Unix command-line interface program which is used to update the access date and / or modification date of a file or directory. In its default usage, it is the equivalent of creating or opening a file and saving it without any change to the file contents.
The alternative to the using the Linux command line is to use the source() function inside of R. The source function will also call a script, but you have to be inside an R session to use it. Here are a few external references to the RScript and R CMD BATCH commands: RScript man page. Run R script from command line. Running R batch mode on Linux.