Expand File Paths

Description

Expand a path name, for example by replacing a leading tilde by the user's home directory (if defined on that platform).

Usage

path.expand(path)

Arguments

Details

On Unix - alikes:

On most builds of R a leading ~user will expand to the home directory of user.

There are possibly different concepts of ‘home directory’: that usually used is the setting of the environment variable HOME.

The ‘path names’ need not exist nor be valid path names but they do need to be representable in the session encoding.

On Windows:

The definition of the ‘home’ directory is in the ‘rw-FAQ’ 2.13: it is taken from the R_USER environment variable (or possibly HOME if R_USER is not set) when path.expand is first called in a session.

The ‘path names’ need not exist nor be valid path names.

Value

A character vector of possibly expanded path names: where the home directory is unknown or none is specified the path is returned unchanged.

If the expansion would exceed the maximum path length the result may be truncated or the path may be returned unchanged.

See Also

basename, normalizePath, file.path.

Examples

path.expand("~/foo")