Check existence of directory and create if doesn't exist
Asked 07 September, 2021
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r
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Votes

I often find myself writing R scripts that generate a lot of output. I find it cleaner to put this output into it's own directory(s). What I've written below will check for the existence of a directory and move into it, or create the directory and then move into it. Is there a better way to approach this?

mainDir <- "c:/path/to/main/dir"
subDir <- "outputDirectory"

if (file.exists(subDir)){
    setwd(file.path(mainDir, subDir))
} else {
    dir.create(file.path(mainDir, subDir))
    setwd(file.path(mainDir, subDir))

}
r

9 Answer