[R] download.file()

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 8:46 AM, Paul Evans <p.evans48 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  I wanted to download a file and did the following:
>  ---------------------------------------------------------
>  > fileLink <-  'ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/geo/DATA/supplementary/series/GSE1000/GSE1000_RAW.tar'
>  > download.file(fileLink,'/geoDat')
>  trying URL 'ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/geo/DATA/supplementary/series/GSE1000/GSE1000_RAW.tar'
>  ftp data connection made, file length 35307520 bytes
>  opened URL
>  downloaded 34480Kb
>
>  >
>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  However, when I look in the destination directory ('/geoDat'), the file is not there (I also tried giving it the absolute path).
>
>  What am I doing wrong?

I'm quite sure the 'destfile' argument of download.file() is a file
not a directory. Example:

> download.file("http://www.r-project.org/index.html", destfile="foo.html")
> file.info("foo.html")
         size isdir mode               mtime               ctime
foo.html  785 FALSE  666 2008-03-18 08:54:19 2008-03-18 08:54:11
                       atime exe
foo.html 2008-03-18 08:54:19  no

So you probably saved the downloaded file as 'geoDat' in the root
directory '/'.

/Henrik


>
>  thanks!
>
>
>
>
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