Thanks, Barry.
In fact, I have a function just like yours, and I'm looking for a simple
alternative function, which is like "path" in Matlab.

On 5/29/07, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Zhiliang Ma wrote:
> >  I want to find a function that can simply add
> > "C:\inFiles\" into R's search path, so that we I scan a file R will go
> to
> > all the search paths to find it. In matlab, path(path,"C:\inFiles") will
> do
> > this job, I'm just wondering if there is a similar function in R can do
> this
> > job.
>
> Something like this (not extensively tested):
>
> `sscan` <-
>    function(name, path=options()$scanpath,...){
>
>      for(p in path){
>        file=file.path(p,name)
>        if(file.exists(file)){
>          return(scan(file,...))
>        }
>        ## last resort..
>        return(scan(name,...))
>      }
>    }
>
> Then do:
>
>   options(scanpath="/tmp")
>
>   and then:
>
>   sscan("foo.data")
>
>   will look for /tmp/foo.data first, then if that fails it will do the
> 'last resort' which is to look in the current directory.
>
>   My worry is that this will bite you one day - if you have two files
> with the same name, it will get the first one in your scanpath - one day
> this will not be the one you think it is....
>
>   Note this only works with 'scan' - you'll have to do the same thing
> for read.table, source, etc etc if you want them to behave with a search
> path too. Unless there's a lower-level approach. But that really will
> bite you!
>
> Barry
>
>
> Barry
>

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