CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rrstudior-markdown
Gregory Palermo
Gregory Palermo

Reputation: 23

Issue: Working Directory in R Studio "stuck" on directory containing open R Markdown file

I am using the most recent version of R (3.3.2), running in the most recent version of RStudio (1.0.136) on MacOS Sierra (10.12.3). I am running into an issue in which my working directory corresponds, and is stuck on, the directory that contains the .RMD file I currently have open in RStudio. Upon opening the file, the working directory is correctly set to the directory holding the .Rproj file. When I go to load in a file with a path relative to that directory, however, I get an error that there is no such file in the current working directory, and the error returns the location of the .RMD file as that working directory.

The working directory, however (using getwd()) still reads where the working directory is supposed to be, and no matter where I try to set it, I still get the same error message when I try to read in a file. Notably, I do NOT get an error message that the working directory cannot be changed--R tells me that the working directory has been changed, and that directory is allegedly the current working directory...but it's not.

I have tried fully (as far as I am aware) uninstalling R and R studio and reinstalling them, to no avail. Does anyone have a solution? This is frustrating the heck out of me right now, since I have to revise all the relative paths in the notebooks that I have defined to do my work in the interim.

Extra information in case it's relevant: I restored from a Time Machine backup that I suspect may have been corrupted somehow; some contents of my Applications folder were missing that I had to move over manually. Could this be causing the issue? Are there other system files that R depends on when interacting with the filesystem that I might look to? I'm trying to avoid doing a clean OS install or a piecemeal rebuilding of my files, since I don't know if that's actually the issue.

Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2633

Answers (1)

K.Daisey
K.Daisey

Reputation: 464

This is a known feature/bug of RStudio notebooks (Working Directory about halfway down). Notebooks are executed in the same directory as the file. As @Simon Jackson noted, you can change this using knitr::opts_knit$set(root.dir = normalizePath()).

Upvotes: 3

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