relativePaths: Relative paths

In reproducible: Enhance Reproducibility of R Code

Relative paths

Description

Extracting relative file paths.

Usage

getRelative(path, relativeToPath)

makeRelative(files, absoluteBase)

Arguments

path	character vector or list specifying file paths
relativeToPath	directory against which path will be relativized.
files	character vector or list specifying file paths
absoluteBase	base directory (as absolute path) to prepend to files

Details

• getRelative() searches path "from the right" (instead of "from the left") and tries to reconstruct it relative to directory specified by relativeToPath. This is useful when dealing with symlinked paths.

• makeRelative() checks to see if files and normPath(absoluteBase) share a common path (i.e., "from the left"), otherwise it returns files.

Examples

## create a project directory (e.g., on a hard drive)
(tmp1 <- tempdir2("myProject", create = TRUE))

## create a cache directory elsewhere (e.g., on an SSD)
(tmp2 <- tempdir2("my_cache", create = TRUE))

## symlink the project cache directory to tmp2
## files created here are actually stored in tmp2
prjCache <- file.path(tmp1, "cache")
file.symlink(tmp2, prjCache)

## create a dummy cache object file in the project cache dir
(tmpf <- tempfile("cache_", prjCache))
cat(rnorm(100), file = tmpf)
file.exists(tmpf)
normPath(tmpf) ## note the 'real' location (i.e., symlink resolved)

getRelative(tmpf, prjCache) ## relative path
getRelative(tmpf, tmp2) ## relative path

makeRelative(tmpf, tmp2) ## abs path; tmpf and normPath(tmp2) don't share common path
makeRelative(tmpf, prjCache) ## abs path; tmpf and normPath(tmp2) don't share common path
makeRelative(normPath(tmpf), prjCache) ## rel path; share common path when both normPath-ed

unlink(tmp1, recursive = TRUE)
unlink(tmp2, recursive = TRUE)

reproducible documentation built on April 3, 2025, 9:50 p.m.