[Rd] directory/filename completion

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, hadley wickham wrote:

> On 4/13/07, Roger Peng <rpeng at jhsph.edu> wrote:
>> I've noticed something recently in R-beta that has changed since R 2.4.1
>> and I'm not sure if it's a readline problem or an R problem.  I am on a
>> Linux FC5 system and in R 2.4.1 I could do
>>
>> load("my-directory/
>>
>> and then hit TAB and it would list all of the files in 'my-directory',
>> after which I could start typing the beginning of the file, hit TAB
>> again, and it would complete the file name along with adding the closing
>> double quote.
>>
>> In R-beta, when I try the same thing, nothing happens (i.e. no directory
>> listing and no file name completion).  Specifically, if I type
>>
>> load("my
>>
>> and then it TAB, it will complete the 'my-directory' but it will not
>> look further into the files inside of 'my-directory'.
>>
>> Also, I've noticed that if I rename 'my-directory' to 'mydirectory' (so
>> no dash), everything works fine (just like in R 2.4.1).
>>
>> Has anyone else noticed this?
>
> I've noticed that if I have the rcompgen library loaded - perhaps
> you've installed that recently?

Loading rcompgen is the default uner 2.5.0 beta, but you can turn it off. 
This is in the USER-VISIBLE CHANGES in NEWS: just how prominent does it 
need to be?

It is a feature of the rcompletion interface to rcompgen, now part of 
base R.  From the source code comment

        These break line into tokens.  Unfortunately, this also breaks
        file names, so a path with a - in it will not be completed.

We decided to make this the default in 2.5.0 to get user feedback: if it 
was not switched on few people would use it.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595