Most "normal" interactions with filenames these days can use forward slashes. But a sampling of edge cases still won't work that way:
- UNC paths like \\server\share\path can be finicky - Long file paths (>260 characters) like \\?\path don't go both ways - Device names like \\.\COM1 don't - Loading DLLs often won't - Calling the system function often won't support forward slashes... system 2 usually will (depending on what executable you are actually calling) I think the UNC, system and DLL cases are probably the ones most likely to bite an intermediate R user. On May 7, 2026 7:53:49 PM PDT, Spencer Graves <[email protected]> wrote: >See also: > > >file.path(..., fsep = .Platform$file.sep) > > >https://web.mit.edu/~r/current/lib/R/library/base/html/file.path.html > > >I'm not sure, but help(".Platform") seems to support what I get from Richard >O'Keefe, that "you can safely use / in file name" perhaps no matter which >platform. At one point that was not true, but it may be the case now. Sorry: I >cannot easily check. Spencer Graves > > >On 5/7/26 21:30, Richard O'Keefe wrote: >> This isn't an R thing. The Windows system calls that accept file names >> accept both kinds of slash indifferently. I've seen it said that this goes >> back to MS-DOS 2, but certainly it's all NT versions. If you need to link >> C and/or Fortran with R, you can safely use / in file name strings in those >> languages too. >> >> On Fri, 8 May 2026 at 01:18, Chris Ryan <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> It had been about a year since I had worked in Windows, and apparently I >>> had gotten rusty. Forward slashes in path names, as in >>> >>> read.csv("e:/path/to/datafileOnWindows.csv") >>> >>> work just fine in R on Windows. >>> >>> Sorry for the bother. >>> >>> --Chris Ryan >>> >>> >>> >>> Chris Ryan wrote: >>>> I'm trying to generalize one of my scripts so that it will run on my >>>> Linux Mint computer at home and my client's Windows 11 computer at work. >>>> I'm encountering trouble when setting file paths, conditional on which >>>> computer the script is running on. It's the Windows backslash issue >>>> >>> >>> ______________________________________________ >>> [email protected] mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >>> PLEASE do read the posting guide >>> https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >>> >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> >> ______________________________________________ >> [email protected] mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >> PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > >______________________________________________ >[email protected] mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -- Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
