File and directory information

Before discussing how to save or read data, we first need to examine R's facilities for getting information about files and directories. We will first discuss the commands used to work with directories and files, and then discuss the commands used to manipulate the current working directory. The basic commands to list directory and file information are the dir, list.dirs, and list.files commands. The basic commands to list and change the current working directory are getwd and setwd.

The dir, list.dirs, and list.files commands are used to get information about directories and files within directories. By default, the commands will get information about the directories in the current working directory:

> dir()
[1] "R"   "bin" "csv"
> d <- dir()
> d[1]
[1] "R"

The preceding commands also accept a wide variety of options. Use of the help command is recommended to see more details:

> list.files('....