Working directories

There are two different ways to represent where a file is: Absolute and relative.

Absolute path for a file is using the root as the starting point (/ for Linux and Mac and C:\ for Windows). This is usually clear to the computer, but it can be really long and not comprehensible to human and thus impossible to wrap our heads around it and write.

For example, I had a note stored in /Users/ycc/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/YCC/Reading note/@gold.brand_2014.md. There is no way I can remember this and type it when writing a script.

Relative path is much shorter, but it could be tricky because sometimes where the path is defined relative to is unclear.

In R, you can find the working directory with getwd(), which gives you the absolute path of the reference.

Say your working directory is /Users/me/my_cool_project, and you have a csv file (named myawesome.csv) stored in a subdirectory called “data”, you can write data/myawesome.csv in R, and R will append /Users/me/my_cool_project before your relative path for you.

If you need to ask R to find /Users/me/a_file_outside_wd.txt for you, relative path still has you covered outside your working directory: .. means go up to the parent folder in relative paths, so /Users/me/a_file_outside_wd.txt is ../a_file_outside_wd.txt if your working directory is /Users/me/my_cool_project.

For tips to set working directories in RStudio, you might also want to check the official documentation.