[R] system-independent path for source()

[David R. Bickel]

That looks good, except the hard disk name should be kept separate from 
the user-specified path. Otherwise, a call from MacOS that uses an 
absolute path will not work on UNIX.

I suggest modifying your file.path interface:
file.path<-function (..., fsep = .Platform$file.sep,absolute=FALSE, 
hard.disk.name = "C") {}

If .Platform$OS.type=="mac" and absolute, then hard.disk.name would be 
added to the beginning of the path.

This way, file.path("Users","thomas",absolute=TRUE, hard.disk.name = 
"Macintosh HD") would work for both MacOS and UNIX. I think this 
interface could also be made to work with Windows.


On Wednesday, February 20, 2002, at 04:32 †, Thomas Lumley wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>
>> All contributions welcome, Thomas!
>
> This seems to be a bit better than the current version, and I'll add it
>
>  file.path<-function (..., fsep = .Platform$file.sep,absolute=FALSE) {
>     rval<-paste(..., sep = fsep)
>     if (xor(absolute,.Platform$OS.type=="mac"))
>         rval<-paste("",rval,sep=fsep)
>     rval
>  }
>
> so now I can do
>   file.path("Macintosh HD","Users","thomas",absolute=TRUE)
> or
>   file.path("Users","thomas")
> for a relative path.
>
> The real question is what to do about disks. In Windows you need the 
> disk
> name to find files on other disks but on the Mac you seem to need the
> disk name even to find the root of the current disk.
>
> It could be taken from getwd() but that seems to make file.path() a lot
> more complicated and less portable.
>
> 	-thomas
>
>

http://www.mcg.edu/research/biostat/bickel.html

David R. Bickel, PhD
Assistant Professor
Medical College of Georgia
Office of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics
1120 Fifteenth St., AE-3037
Augusta, GA 30912-4900

Tel.: 706-721-4697; Fax: 706-721-6294
E-mail: dbickel at mail.mcg.edu or bickel at prueba.info

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