Path separator issues in OSX 10.5

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