[R] Strange behaviour of setwd/getwd

[Markus Holotta]

Maybe my question was not clear enough:
default.wd is the working dir defined in the RStudio options.
In my script I want to change it temporarily to another directory by  
setwd(choose.dir()) and set it back to the default.wd before calling  
another script. But after choosing the new directory tmp.wd shows the same  
path in the workspace as default.wd. Calling getwd() shows the correct  
path.
Hope its clearer now.


Am 02.11.2012, 19:14 Uhr, schrieb Duncan Murdoch  
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>:

> On 02/11/2012 12:57 PM, Markus Holotta wrote:
>> I've found the following strange behaviour R (RStudio) which has been
>> confirmed by another user in RGui.
>>
>>
>> Inside a script I want to set two variables:
>>
>> default.wd = getwd()
>> tmp.wd = setwd(choose.dir())
>>
>> After choosing tmp.wd the value of default.wd is shown in Workspace, but
>> getwd() is giving back the correct string of tmp.wd.
>>    Is there a workaround for the problem?
>>
>
>
> It's not clear what the problem is from your post.  As the help page  
> says, both default.wd and tmp.wd should be the same after executing  
> those two lines.  If you want to store both the old and new directories,  
> you should do it like this:
>
> old.wd <- setwd(choose.dir())
> new.wd <- getwd()
>
> Duncan Murdoch