> > > --- > Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 16:52:09 +0000 (GMT) > From: Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: John W. Eaton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,Martin Maechler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [Rd] Question about Unix file paths > > > > On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, John W. Eaton wrote: > > > On 26-Nov-2003, Martin Maechler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > | >>>>> " Kurt" == Kurt Hornik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > | >>>>> on Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:05:42 +0100 writes: > > | > > | Kurt> Right. In any case, an explicit glob() function > > | Kurt> seems preferable to me ... > > | > > | Good idea! > > | > > | More than 12 years ago, I had a similar one, and wrote a > > | "pat2grep()" {pattern to grep regular expression} function > > | --- for S-plus on Unix --- which I have now renamed to glob2regexp(): > > | -- still not really usable outside unix (or windows with the > > | 'sed' tool in the path), nor perfect, but maybe a good start: > > | > > | sys <- function(...) system(paste(..., sep = "")) > > | > > | glob2regexp <- function(pattern) > > | { > > | ## Purpose: Change "ls pattern" to "grep regular expression" pattern. > > | ## ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > | ## Author: Martin Maechler ETH Zurich, ~ 1991 > > | sys("echo '", pattern, "'| sed ", > > | "'s/\\./\\\\./g;s/*/.*/g;s/?/./g; s/^/^/;s/$/$/; s/\\.\\*\\$$//'") > > | } > > > > It seems to me that using this approach to implement a proper glob() > > function would be more work than using the glob code that is available > > as part of bash, which I think will allow you to handle much more > > complex patterns, including [xyz] {a,b,c} etc. > > Or even the glob code from Perl, which is cross-platform. It is not clear > to me what we would want glob() to do on Windows, BTW. > > -- > Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It would work similarly to: readLines(pipe("cmd /c dir/b a*.dat")) If the question is what would it be used for then I have a number of data files with nearly the same name and want the most recent. I started out using list.files but found the pattern matching less natural when it comes to files than file globbing so I changed this to use the above. After that I use file.info to find out which is the most recent and then read in that. ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel