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()

[1] "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())

[1] 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()
[1] TRUE

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common functions in R: