Message-ID: <peh6sv41hpuo8ucnuo7jgocgjb0giugimf@4ax.com>
Date: 2003-11-25T13:13:52Z
From: Duncan Murdoch
Subject: Question about Unix file paths
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0311250728180.26806-100000@gannet.stats>
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