[R] filename of current device

David Winsemius dwinsemius at comcast.net
Thu May 15 01:29:39 CEST 2014


On May 14, 2014, at 3:44 PM, Andreas Leha wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> Thank you for following up on that.
> 
> David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> writes:
> 
>> On May 14, 2014, at 3:04 PM, Andreas Leha wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> how do I find out about the filename, the currently open (let's say pdf)
>>> device is writing to?
>>> 
>>> If I find 'dev.cur()' returning 'pdf 3' when I expect 'nulldevice 1' I
>>> would like to know, which file that pdf device is actually targeting.
>>> 
>>> Any help for my poor organization is highly appreciated...
>>> 
>> 
>> Have your read the help file for pdf()? The first argument is the default naming mechanism:
>> 
>> file = ifelse(onefile, "Rplots.pdf", "Rplot%03d.pdf")
>> 
>> So if you call pdf() then it will write to the working directory with a named constructed from those choices.
>> 
> 
> Sorry for being unclear.  I am aware of that.  My use case is, that
> apparently, I have called pdf("somefile.pdf") somewhen during a long
> lasting R session.
> 
> I tend to have separate R sessions open in parallel
> for the project I am working on.  So, I can easily have R session open
> that run for weeks.
> 
> So, when I return to an R session (when I got some additional data, I
> was asking for, e.g.) after several days, I do not know what that call
> was.  And for several reasons, the actual call (pdf("somefile.pdf"))
> might not even be visible in my R session.
> 
> In that situation, I would like to know, which is the open file for the
> current device.

Well, if you acheived success with the pdf() call by executing dev.off() then you closed that device. The previous device does leave behind a footprint but not the entire name of hte file or the contents. 

?dev.prev

> old.dev <-dev.prev()
> str(old.dev)
 Named int 5
 - attr(*, "names")= chr "pdf"


If you had not changed working directory you may be able to then look at all of the pdf files. You can get information with file,info()

?file.info


> 
> I hope that makes my question clearer.
> 
> Regards,
> Andreas
> 
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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA



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