[R] setting new working directories

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 1/4/2007 9:41 AM, Bill Shipley wrote:
> Hello, and Happy New Year.  My default working directory is getting very
> cluttered.  I know that I should be using a different working directory for
> each project (I work in Windows), but do not know how to go about creating
> different ones and moving back and forth between them.  I have read Venables
> & Ripley (Modern Applied Statistics with S-PLUS, 1994) but this seems out of
> date with respect to this topic and have searched through the documentation
> but cannot find a clear explanation for doing this.  Can someone point me to
> the proper documentation for creating and using different working
> directories from within Windows (please, no comments about switching to
> UNIX...).

I don't think R has facilities for creating directories:  you would do 
that in the OS, e.g. in Windows Explorer, right click and ask for "New | 
Folder".

In Windows the easiest way to set a directory as the current working 
directory is

setwd(choose.dir())

In the choose.dir dialog you can type the directory name in standard 
Windows format (don't worry about escaping \), or you can use the 
directory browser to choose it.

By the way, if you do decide to switch to Unix, you'll have to do 
without choose.dir() (unless it's in a contributed package somewhere).

Duncan Murdoch