How to check file size before opening?

Question

How can I check the size of a file before I load it into R?

For example:

http://math.ucdenver.edu/RTutorial/titanic.txt

I'd like to use the optimal command to open a file based on the file's size.

Answer 1

Use file.info()

file.info("data/ullyses.txt")

                    size isdir mode               mtime               ctime               atime  uid  gid
data/ullyses.txt 1573151 FALSE  664 2015-06-01 15:25:55 2015-06-01 15:25:55 2015-06-01 15:25:55 1008 1008

Then extract the column called size:

file.info("data/ullyses.txt")$size
[1] 1573151