[R] String problems

[MMarques Power]

after reading some docs I still can not find anything how to escape
the "\" string


I know that "\" in files needs to be escaped in order to be read by R.
But in Windows if I try to call any shell util I keep getting errors.
example:

afile <- "g:\\simulation\\at"
works fine with read.table(afile) ...

but if I try sometthing like this:
aprogram <- paste( "c:\dir", afile, sep=" " )
system(aprogram)
it crashes...

How can I remove the double "\" in the afile ?
I know that I need to reconstruct the afile string without the double
"\"

Ideas ?
or am I missing something ?