[R-SIG-Mac] How to find the path for a file to be read with read.table() in a Mac

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 13/02/2021 10:42 a.m., Parkhurst, David F. wrote:
> I’ve several times to figure this out with no luck.  I’ve moved a tab delimited text file (created from excel) to the desktop to simplify the path.  If I click on the file and ask Get Info, it lists “Where” as  iCloud Drive > Desktop.  If I copy that to the clipboard and paste that into a read.table command in the R console, it comes up as /Users/DFP/Desktop.  But if I try read.table("\\Users\\DFP\\Desktop\\moabsitechem"), I get No such file or directory.  How can I get that file into a data frame?
> 
> Is there some place in my Mac that I can put the file so I could enter just the file name, and not the whole path?

It doesn't make sense to use backslashes in the path:  macOS will see 
those as part of the name, not as path separators.  Just use 
read.table("/Users/DFP/Desktop/moabsitechm") if that's the filename.

Duncan Murdoch