[R] access networked PCs directories/files with R ?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, mel wrote:

> access networked PCs directories/files with R ?
>
> Dear group,
>
> I would like to know if there is an "easy" way to access several
> networked PCs directories/files from one PC with R ?
> Concerned OS is windows.
>
> I can for instance use dir() on my current PC.
> Is there a way to do dir() on a connected PC ?
> (Is there a special syntax for the path ?)

If it works at all, the usual syntax will work. E.g.

> dir("\\\\reeve\\temp")
[1] "biblio.tex" "R"

(that's \\reeve\temp, the share \temp on machine 'reeve').

> (read.table() or readLines() work with URLs
> I imagine it may also work on connected shared PCs)

No, because MS has not implemented the RFC1738 for URLs to apply to remote 
machines.  See ?url.


-- 
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