Thanks Jeff and Sarah. I was thinking mainly of using the base path and paste routine which is something I do in Windows
It will take me a while to figrue out relative paths. John Kane Kingston ON Canada > -----Original Message----- > From: sarah.gos...@gmail.com > Sent: Thu, 3 May 2012 14:07:12 -0400 > To: jdnew...@dcn.davis.ca.us > Subject: Re: [R] Cannot read or write to file in Linux Ubuntu > > On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Jeff Newmiller <jdnew...@dcn.davis.ca.us> > wrote: >> "I like the idea of staying with absolute paths." >> >> Before you write too much R code that builds in absolute paths, please >> consider how difficult it will be to adjust all of those paths if you >> need to run on a different computer or you need to reorganize your >> overall directory structure. If you keep related R files in the same >> project directory, you can collapse all of those paths down to short >> relative paths, and do one setwd at the beginning, or learn to manually >> set your base working directory as a matter of habit before each working >> session. (This habit is useful in more areas than just R programming.) > > I agree with this, which is why I suggested you use absolute paths > *until you get more comfortable with the file system.* It's a good way > to diagnose your problem and figure out how to deal with paths on > Linux, but not a good long-term strategy unless you expect that you > will never ever move anything or change to a new computer. > > An intermediate solution that I use a lot is to put something like > this at the beginning of R script file: > basepath = "/home/sarahg/whatever" > and then load files using something like > read.table(paste(basepath, "plantdata.csv", sep="/")) > > This eases portability between computers: I exchange a lot of analyses > with postdocs, students and techs, and somehow they've not all become > convinced that my way of organizing directories is the best one. Using > an object with the absolute path for the data means that we can pass > things back and forth with only changing one value within the script > rather than all input/output commands. > > Sarah > > -- > Sarah Goslee > http://www.functionaldiversity.org > ____________________________________________________________ TRY FREE IM TOOLPACK at http://www.imtoolpack.com/default.aspx?rc=if5 Capture screenshots, upload images, edit and send them to your friends through IMs, post on Twitter®, Facebook®, MySpace™, LinkedIn® – FAST! ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
