From dmurdoch at pair.com  Tue Nov 25 13:14:49 2003
From: dmurdoch at pair.com (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Tue Nov 25 13:13:52 2003
Subject: [Rd] Question about Unix file paths
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0311250728180.26806-100000@gannet.stats>
References: <17b5svs7cl2cjmto222665p545mb0ok74u@4ax.com>
	<Pine.LNX.4.44.0311250728180.26806-100000@gannet.stats>
Message-ID: <peh6sv41hpuo8ucnuo7jgocgjb0giugimf@4ax.com>

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 07:35:57 +0000 (GMT), you wrote:


>I think there are some potential issues with doubling separators and final
>separators on dirs.  On Unix file systems /part1//part2 and /path/to/dir/
>are valid.  However, file systems on Unix may not be Unix file systems:
>examples are earlier MacOS systems on MacOS X and mounted Windows and 
>Novell systems on Linux.  I would not want to assume that all of these
>combinations worked.

This is something that R could not do reliably by itself.  The code I
committed checks the final character in the path, and if it's "/", "\"
or ":" doesn't add a path separator.  However, both "C:" and "C:\" are
valid directory names in standard Unix file systems, so the test would
do the wrong thing there.

I think people who mount strange file systems will just have to expect
occasional glitches.  The only way I can see around this is to add
another argument to list.files() to say whether to add a path
separator, but it would be so rarely used that it doesn't seem to be
worth the effort.

Duncan Murdoch


[Rd] Question about Unix file paths
Duncan Murdoch