[R] Genuine relative paths with R

Ista Zahn
Sat, 06 Oct 2018 12:56:34 -0000

Hi Oliver,

Interesting question. Can you describe your motivation in a little
more detail? That is, why do you what this feature? I ask because to
my way of thinking you have to know the path to the script in order to
call it in the first place. If calling from R, is

setwd("/path/to/dir")
source("file.R")

really so much worse than

source("path/to/dir/file.R")

?  If it is worse, why?

Similarly if calling from a shell, is

cd /path/to/dir
Rscript file.R

really so much worse than

Rscript /path/to/dir/file.R

? Again, if is worse, why?

Best,
Ista
On Sat, Oct 6, 2018 at 8:25 AM Olivier GIVAUDAN
<olivier_givaudan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear R users,
>
> I would like to work with genuine relative paths in R for obvious reasons:
if I move all my scripts related to some project as a whole to another location
of my computer or someone else's computer, if want my scripts to continue to
run seamlessly.
>
> What I mean by "genuine" is that it should not be necessary to
hardcode one single absolute path (making the code obviously not
"portable" - to another place - anymore).
>
> For the time being, I found the following related posts, unfortunately
never conclusive or even somewhat off-topic:
>
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1815606/rscript-determine-path-of-the-executing-script
>
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47044068/get-the-path-of-current-script/47045368
>
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Script-auto-detecting-its-own-path-td2719676.html
>
> So I found 2 workarounds, more or less satisfactory:
>
>
>   1.  Either create a variable "ScriptPath" in the first lines of
each of my R scripts and run a batch (or shell, etc.) to replace every single
occurrence of "ScriptPath <-" by "ScriptPath <- [Absolute
path of the R script]" in all the R scripts located in the folder (and
possibly subfolders) of the batch file.
>   2.  Or create an R project file with RStudio and use the package
"here" to get the absolute path of the R project file and put all the
R scripts related to this project in the R project directory, as often
recommended.
>
> But I am really wondering why R doesn't have (please tell me if I'm
wrong) this basic feature as many other languages have it (batch, shell, C,
LaTeX, SAS with macro-variables, etc.)?
> Do you know whether the language will have this kind of function in a near
future? What are the obstacles / what is the reasoning for not having it
already?
>
> Do you know other workarounds?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Olivier
>
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>
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