Whenever you use R, your environment is always pointed to some working directory.
You can use the following functions in R to get the working directory and set the working directory:
- getwd() – Get the current working directory
- setwd(‘Path/To/Some/Directory’) – Set current working directory
The following examples show how to use these functions in practice.
Example 1: Get Working Directory
We can use the getwd() function to display the current working directory in R:
#display current working directory getwd()  "C:/Users/Bob/Desktop"
Example 2: Set Working Directory
We can then use the setwd() function to set the working directory to some new location:
#set working directory setwd('C:/Users/Bob/Documents')
We can then verify that the working directory has changed by using the getwd() function again to get the current working directory:
#display current working directory getwd() "C:/Users/Bob/Documents"
Example 3: View Files in Working Directory
Once we’ve set the working directory, we can use the list.files() function to view the file names within the directory:
#view number of files in working directory length(list.files())  147 #view first five file names in working directory head(list.files()) "output.yml" "analysis3.R" "analysis3-1.R" "testdoc.R" "final_model2.Rmd"
We can also use the %in% operator to check if a specific file is located in our current working directory:
#check if file 'analysis3.R' exists in working directory 'analysis3.R' %in% list.files()  TRUE
An output value of TRUE indicates that the specific file is indeed located in the current working directory.
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common functions in R: