Determine Path of Current Script in R (Example)

In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to find the file location of the currently executing R script in R programming.

Table of contents:

Let’s dig in…

Example: Get File Location of Currently Opened R Script

In this Example, I’ll illustrate how to return the working directory of the currently used R script.

We first have to install and load the rstudioapi package:

install.packages("rstudioapi")   # Install rstudioapi package
library("rstudioapi")            # Load rstudioapi package

Now, we can use the getSourceEditorContext function to identify the file path of the executing R script:

getSourceEditorContext()$path    # Applying getSourceEditorContext
# "C:/Users/Joach/Desktop/Example_File.R"

As you can see based on the output of the RStudio console, the script is currently stored on the desktop of my computer: “C:/Users/Joach/Desktop/Example_File.R”

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Do you want to learn more about file locations? Then I can recommend to have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. I’m explaining the R programming syntax of this article in the video.

The YouTube video will be added soon.

In addition, I can recommend to have a look at the related tutorials on https://statisticsglobe.com/.

• Set Working Directory to Source File Location Automatically vs. Manually in RStudio
• Check Existence of Local File in R
• Check in R if a Directory Exists and Create if It doesn’t
• The R Programming Language

Summary: At this point you should have learned how to identify the currently used file path in the R programming language. Don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments section, in case you have additional comments and/or questions.