[R] Running R Script on a Sequence of Files

Barry Rowlingson b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk
Fri Dec 5 20:01:57 CET 2008


2008/12/5 Chris Poliquin <poliquin at sas.upenn.edu>:
> Hi,
>
> I have about 900 files that I need to run the same R script on.  I looked
> over the R Data Import/Export Manual and  couldn't come up with a way to
> read in a sequence of files.
>
> The files all have unique names and are in the same directory.  What I want
> to do is:
> 1) Create a list of the file names in the directory (this is really what I
> need help with)
> 2) For each item in the list...
>        a) open the file with read.table
>        b) perform some analysis
>        c) append some results to an array or save them to another file
> 3) Next File
>
> My initial instinct is to use Python to rename all the files with numbers
> 1:900 and then read them all, but the file names contain some information
> that I would like to keep intact and having to keep a separate database of
> original names and numbers seems inefficient.  Is there a way to have R read
> all the files in a directory one at a time?

 I can't believe the two 'solutions' already posted. It's easy:

 ?list.files

Barry



More information about the R-help mailing list