R command for setting working directory to source file location in Rstudio

Question

I am working out some tutorials in R  Each R code is contained in a specific folder  There are data files and other files in there  I want to open the  r file and source it such that I do not have to change the working directory in Rstudio as shown below     Is there a way to specify my working directory automatically in R

User · Answer

Most GUIs assume that if you are in a directory and "open", double-click, or otherwise attempt to execute an .R file, that the directory in which it resides will be the working directory unless otherwise specified. The Mac GUI provides a method to change that default behavior which is changeable in the Startup panel of Preferences that you set in a running session and become effective at the next "startup". You should be also looking at:

?Startup

The RStudio documentation says:

"When launched through a file association, RStudio automatically sets the working directory to the directory of the opened file." The default setup is for RStudio to be register as a handler for .R files, although there is also mention of ability to set a default "association" with RStudio for .Rdata and .R extensions. Whether having 'handler' status and 'association' status are the same on Linux, I cannot tell.

http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/using/workspaces

User · Answer

I know this question is outdated  but I was searching for a solution for that as well and Google lists this at the very top   this dir  lt - dirname parent frame 2  ofile  setwd this dir    put that somewhere into the file  best would be the beginning  though   so that the wd is changed according to that file   According to the comments  this might not necessarily work on every platform  Windows seems to work  Linux Mac for some   Keep in mind that this solution is for  sourcing  the files  not necessarily for running chunks in that file   see also get filename and path of  source d file

User · Answer

For rstudio  you can automatically set your working directory to the script directory using rstudioapi like that   library rstudioapi     Getting the path of your current open file current path   rstudioapi  getActiveDocumentContext   path  setwd dirname current path    print  getwd       This works when Running or Sourceing your file   You need to install the package rstudioapi first  Notice I print the path to be 100  sure I m at the right place  but this is optional

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I understand this is outdated  but I couldn t get the former answers to work very satisfactorily  so I wanted to contribute my method in case any one else encounters the same error mentioned in the comments to BumbleBee s answer   Mine is based on a simple system command  All you feed the function is the name of your script   extractRootDir  lt - function x        abs  lt - suppressWarnings system paste  find    -name  x   wait T  intern T  ignore stderr T   1       path  lt - paste     substr abs  3  length strsplit abs      1     sep          ret  lt - gsub x      path       return ret      setwd extractRootDir  myScript R       The output from the function would look like   Users you Path To Script   Hope this helps anyone else who may have gotten stuck

User · Answer

The here package provides the here   function  which returns your project root directory based on some heuristics    Not the perfect solution  since it doesn t find the location of the script  but it suffices for some purposes so I thought I d put it here

User · Answer

If you work on Linux you can try this   setwd system  pwd   intern   T     It works for me

User · Answer

Here is another way to do it    set2  lt - function name NULL      wd  lt - rstudioapi  getSourceEditorContext   path   if   is null name         if  substr name  nchar name  - 1  nchar name        R          name  lt - paste0 name    R         else       name  lt - stringr  word wd  -1  sep            wd  lt - gsub wd  pattern paste0      name   replacement         no print  lt - eval expr setwd wd   envir    GlobalEnv    set2

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I was just looking for a solution to this problem  came to this page  I know its dated but the previous solutions where unsatisfying or didn t work for me  Here is my work around if interested   filename    your file R  filepath   file choose      browse and select your file R in the window dir   substr filepath  1  nchar filepath -nchar filename   setwd dir

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This answer can help   script dir  lt - dirname sys frame 1  ofile       Note  script must be sourced in order to return correct path   I found it in  https   support rstudio com hc communities public questions 200895567-can-user-obtain-the-path-of-current-Project-s-directory-  The BumbleBee  s answer  with parent frame instead sys frame  didn  t work to me  I always get an error

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dirname parent frame 2  ofile      doesn t work for me either  but the following  as suggested in https   stackoverflow com a 35842176 992088  works for me in ubuntu 14 04  dirname rstudioapi  getActiveDocumentContext   path

User · Answer

In case you use UTF-8 encoding   path  lt - rstudioapi  getActiveDocumentContext   path Encoding path   lt -  UTF-8  setwd dirname path     You need to install the package rstudioapi if you haven t done it yet

User · Answer

I realize that this is an old thread  but I had a similar problem with needing to set the working directory and couldn t get any of the solutions to work for me  Here s what did work  in case anyone else stumbles across this later on     SET WORKING DIRECTORY TO CURRENT DIRECTORY  system  pwd  pwd    pwd 2 gt  dummyfile txt   dir  lt - fread  dummyfile txt   n lt - colnames dir  2  n2  lt - substr n  1  nchar n -1  setwd n2    It s a bit convoluted  but basically this uses system commands to get the working directory and save it to dummyfile txt  then R reads that file using data table  fread  The rest is just cleaning up what got printed to the file so that I m left with just the directory path   I needed to run R on a cluster  so there was no way to know what directory I d end up in  jobs get assigned a number and a compute node   This did the trick for me

User · Answer

dirname rstudioapi  getActiveDocumentContext   path    works for me but if you don t want to use rstudioapi and you are not in a proyect  you can use the symbol   in your path  The symbol   refers to the default RStudio working directory  at least on Windows      If your RStudio working directory is  D  Documents   setwd    proyect1   is the same as setwd  D  Documents proyect1     Once you set that  you can navigate to a subdirectory  read csv  DATA mydata csv    Is the same as read csv  D  Documents proyect1 DATA mydata csv     If you want to navigate to a parent folder  you can use         For example  read csv     olddata DATA mydata csv   which is the same as read csv  D  Documents oldata DATA mydata csv    This is the best way for me to code scripts  no matter what computer you are using

User · Answer

To get the location of a script being sourced  you can use utils  getSrcDirectory or utils  getSrcFilename   So changing the working directory to that of the current file can be done with   setwd getSrcDirectory   1     This does not work in RStudio if you Run the code rather than Sourceing it   For that  you need to use rstudioapi  getActiveDocumentContext   setwd dirname rstudioapi  getActiveDocumentContext   path     This second solution requires that you are using RStudio as your IDE  of course

User · Answer

The solution   dirname parent frame 2  ofile    not working for me   I m using a brute force algorithm  but works   File  lt -  filename  Files  lt - list files path file path      recursive T include dirs T  Path file  lt - names unlist sapply Files grep pattern File   1   Dir wd  lt - dirname Path file    More easy when searching a directory   Dirname  lt -  subdir name  Dirs  lt - list dirs path file path      recursive T  dir wd  lt - names unlist sapply Dirs grep pattern Dirname   1

[r] R command for setting working directory to source file location in Rstudio

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