R help - Aug 2010 - Finding source files automatically within a script

Hi there,

Ive tried trawling the lists for a solution but I could not find any
matches.  I am typing up all my code on a Linux machine and I call this
other script file from my script file using source("foo.r").  Now
sometimes
i access my folder from my Windows machine at work (the files are on
dropbox).  But of course my windows machine would not understand the linux
path name.

Is there any syntax for searching the file system for "foo.r" from
within
the script file that I am writing?  I know that I can always change the
working directory to the one where the script file is stored but is there
any other way?

Thanks!
Abhisek Banerjee

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Abhisek <shieks at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Ive tried trawling the lists for a solution but I could not find any
> matches. ?I am typing up all my code on a Linux machine and I call this
> other script file from my script file using source("foo.r"). ?Now
sometimes
> i access my folder from my Windows machine at work (the files are on
> dropbox). ?But of course my windows machine would not understand the linux
> path name.
>
> Is there any syntax for searching the file system for "foo.r"
from within
> the script file that I am writing? ?I know that I can always change the
> working directory to the one where the script file is stored but is there
> any other way?
>
> Thanks!
> Abhisek Banerjee
>
You could (1) use file.exists to successively check specific paths.
It will return FALSE if the path does not exist letting you skip over
the bad paths.  See ?file.exists

You could alternately (2) set an option in the your .Profile on both
machines (?options, ?getOption, ?Startup), (3) outside of R set up
environment variables on both machines reading them in with Sys.getenv
or (4) set up configuration files (e.g. a file with just one line
giving the path to the file) which you read in from your home
directory e.g., readLines("~/.myconfig")  Note that ~ works from
within R even on Windows and forward slashes work in Windows filenames
from within R as well as backslashes.

-- 
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com