[Rd] Limitation of dirname() and basename()

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 3/27/07, cstrato <cstrato at aon.at> wrote:
> Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
> > cstrato wrote:
> >> 1. I did read the help file.
> >> 2. I have my own workaround, using e.g.
> >> file.info("/my/path/")[,"isdir"]
> >> 3. This was a suggestion.
> >> 4. If you agree with me that "/my/path/" is a path, then both
> >>    "dirname()" and "dirname" give an incorrect answer.
> >> 5. Maybe, you can give me a logical reason (besides a
> >>    historical reason) why this should be the way it is.
> >
> > Can you just read "man 3 dirname" and "man 1 dirname" on any unix box?
> > Isn't "historical reason" - this is how dirname works for the last
> > 25(?) years, some people will be *very* upset if it behaves
> > differently now -
> > a good enough reason?
> >
> > HTL
> A 25 year old mistake is no reason for R to duplicate this mistake.
> >

It would be possible to have the way it works controlled by an argument
if backward compatibility is the issue:
e.g.

dirname("/my/path/", extended = TRUE)

or it would be possible to have a second command:

dirname2("/my/path/")