[R-SIG-Mac] Path separator issues in OSX 10.5

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jan 21, 2009, at 13:15 , Ben Tupper wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have a new Mac OSX 10.5 iMac running R 2.8.1.  Using Finder, I  
> manually created a folder for R source code as /Users/Shared/code/R.
>
> If I use R.app's "Misc>Change Working Directory..." menu dialog to  
> navigate to /Users/Shared/code/R and then use getwd() to print the  
> directory path, the components of the path are separated with colons  
> as shown:  /Users/Shared/Shared:code/Shared:code:R
>
> The R function file.path() does not produces these colon-ized paths.
>

Why should it? The colon is part of the name - the name of your  
directory is "Shared:code" so the proper use of file.path is
 > file.path("/Users","Shared","Shared:Code","Shared:code:R")
[1] "/Users/Shared/Shared:Code/Shared:code:R"

BTW: I suspect you are not quite aware of what you're doing in your  
Finder - you're creating files/directories that have a slash in their  
name which the Finder re-maps to colons. This has nothing to do with R  
- it's a historic work-around in the Finder from times when / was  
valid in file names in OS 9 and I suspect you didn't really mean to  
create those files/directories that way...

Cheers,
S


> I have pasted below the commands I used as well as the output of  
> sessionInfo().  Additionally, I have provided the output of the ls  
> command from the Terminal which also appears to use the colon-ized  
> form.
>
> I cannot replicate this issue in OSX 10.4.11 and R 2.8.1.  I am not  
> sure how to proceed and suggestions are most welcome.
>
> Thanks,
> Ben
>
>
>
> # file.path() creates the paths with the path separator "/"
> > ROOTDIR <- file.path("/", "Users", "Shared")
> > file.path(ROOTDIR, "code", "R")
> [1] "//Users/Shared/code/R"
>
> # but according to the dir() it is unreadable
> > dir(file.path(ROOTDIR, "code", "R"))
> character(0)
> Warning message:
> In dir(file.path(ROOTDIR, "code", "R")) :
> list.files: '//Users/Shared/code/R' is not a readable directory
>
>
> # use R.app's Misc>Change Working Directory...
> # to change to "/Users/Shared/code/R"
> > getwd()
> [1] "/Users/Shared/Shared:code/Shared:code:R"
>
>
> > sessionInfo()
> R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22)
> i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
>
> locale:
> en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
> >
>
>
> From Terminal...
> Henry:Shared Brian$ ls
> SC Info                Shared:code        Shared:data         
> Shared:doc
>
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