Working with a large number of files for reading into R #rstats

Using the dir() and list.files() commands lists all the files in a particular directory. These can be interactively read by R, by referencing to specific parts of the list created by the above two commands. This is useful when you are working with a large number of files, that get generated or re-generated after specific time periods (like web server log files)

> getwd()
[1] “C:/Users/KUs/Documents”
> path=”C:/Users/KUs/Desktop/tester”
> dir(path)
[1] “tester.csv” “tester2.csv” “tester3.csv””tester4.csv”
> setwd(path)
> read.table(file=dir(path)[1],sep=”t”,header=T)
X1 X2 X3 X4
1 to be 2 B

> read.table(file=dir(path)[4],sep=”,”,header=T)
zoo bee doo bee.1 daa
1 12 32 43 34 qwerty

Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

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