R help - Sep 2003 - Using the system command

Hello, I am currently taking a statistics course and we are to do a project
producing a graph using multiple input files.
 
In R, I'm trying to build a filelist based on a pattern.  For some reason,
if I do the command interactively and not assign it to an array variable I get
what I thought I should, but if I do this inside my R program it chops off some
file names and thinks there are two.
 
I looked on the R website and found that there is an 8,096 character limit when
using a character array but mine chops at 119.
 
Here is the command:
filelist <- system(paste("ls ", INPUTFILES,
sep=""),intern=T)
 
Any help would be much appreciated.
 
Thanks,
Suzie Smith
 


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Suzy Smith wrote:
> Hello, I am currently taking a statistics course and we are to do a project
producing a graph using multiple input files.
>  
> In R, I'm trying to build a filelist based on a pattern.  For some
reason, if I do the command interactively and not assign it to an array variable
I get what I thought I should, but if I do this inside my R program it chops off
some file names and thinks there are two.
>  
> I looked on the R website and found that there is an 8,096 character limit
when using a character array but mine chops at 119.
>  
> Here is the command:
> filelist <- system(paste("ls ", INPUTFILES,
sep=""),intern=T)
>  
> Any help would be much appreciated.
>  
  I dont know why that doesn't work - it might be specific to the files 
on your system. However, R has some functions for finding files, such as 
list.files():

 > filelist <- list.files(pattern=".dat$")
 > filelist
[1] "jobacct.dat" "winmail.dat"
 >

  Get more info by typing ?list.files

  The following functions may also be useful:

file.access(base)       Ascertain File Accessibility
file.choose(base)       Choose a File Interactively
file.info(base)         Extract File Information
file.path(base)         Construct Path to File
file.show(base)         Display One or More Files

Baz