Get the path of current script

Panos Kal. picture Panos Kal. · Oct 31, 2017 · Viewed 44.4k times · Source

I would like to set the working directory to the path of current script programmatically but first I need to get the path of current script.

So I would like to be able to do:

current_path = ...retrieve the path of current script ...
setwd(current_path) 

Just like the RStudio menu does: RStudio set working directory

So far I tried:

initial.options <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = FALSE)
file.arg.name <- "--file="
script.name <- sub(file.arg.name, "", initial.options[grep(file.arg.name, initial.options)])
script.basename <- dirname(script.name)

script.name returns NULL

source("script.R", chdir = TRUE)

Returns: Error in file(filename, "r", encoding = encoding) : cannot open the connection In addition: Warning message: In file(filename, "r", encoding = encoding) : cannot open file '/script.R': No such file or directory

dirname(parent.frame(2)$ofile)

Returns: Error in dirname(parent.frame(2)$ofile) : a character vector argument expected ...because parent.frame is null

frame_files <- lapply(sys.frames(), function(x) x$ofile)
frame_files <- Filter(Negate(is.null), frame_files)
PATH <- dirname(frame_files[[length(frame_files)]])

Returns: Null because frame_files is a list of 0

thisFile <- function() {
    cmdArgs <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = FALSE)
    needle <- "--file="
    match <- grep(needle, cmdArgs)
    if (length(match) > 0) {
        # Rscript
        return(normalizePath(sub(needle, "", cmdArgs[match])))
    } else {
        # 'source'd via R console
        return(normalizePath(sys.frames()[[1]]$ofile))
    }
}

Returns: Error in path.expand(path) : invalid 'path' argument

Also I saw all answers from here, here, here and here. No joy.

Working with RStudio 1.1.383

EDIT: It would be great if there was no need for an external library to achieve this.

Answer

user2554330 picture user2554330 · Oct 31, 2017

In RStudio, you can get the path to the file currently shown in the source pane using

rstudioapi::getSourceEditorContext()$path

If you only want the directory, use

dirname(rstudioapi::getSourceEditorContext()$path)

If you want the name of the file that's been run by source(filename), that's a little harder. You need to look for the variable srcfile somewhere back in the stack. How far back depends on how you write things, but it's around 4 steps back: for example,

fi <- tempfile()
writeLines("f()", fi)
f <- function() print(sys.frame(-4)$srcfile)
source(fi)
fi

should print the same thing on the last two lines.