[R] filename of current device
David Winsemius
dwinsemius at comcast.net
Thu May 15 01:29:39 CEST 2014
On May 14, 2014, at 3:44 PM, Andreas Leha wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> Thank you for following up on that.
>
> David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> writes:
>
>> On May 14, 2014, at 3:04 PM, Andreas Leha wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> how do I find out about the filename, the currently open (let's say pdf)
>>> device is writing to?
>>>
>>> If I find 'dev.cur()' returning 'pdf 3' when I expect 'nulldevice 1' I
>>> would like to know, which file that pdf device is actually targeting.
>>>
>>> Any help for my poor organization is highly appreciated...
>>>
>>
>> Have your read the help file for pdf()? The first argument is the default naming mechanism:
>>
>> file = ifelse(onefile, "Rplots.pdf", "Rplot%03d.pdf")
>>
>> So if you call pdf() then it will write to the working directory with a named constructed from those choices.
>>
>
> Sorry for being unclear. I am aware of that. My use case is, that
> apparently, I have called pdf("somefile.pdf") somewhen during a long
> lasting R session.
>
> I tend to have separate R sessions open in parallel
> for the project I am working on. So, I can easily have R session open
> that run for weeks.
>
> So, when I return to an R session (when I got some additional data, I
> was asking for, e.g.) after several days, I do not know what that call
> was. And for several reasons, the actual call (pdf("somefile.pdf"))
> might not even be visible in my R session.
>
> In that situation, I would like to know, which is the open file for the
> current device.
Well, if you acheived success with the pdf() call by executing dev.off() then you closed that device. The previous device does leave behind a footprint but not the entire name of hte file or the contents.
?dev.prev
> old.dev <-dev.prev()
> str(old.dev)
Named int 5
- attr(*, "names")= chr "pdf"
If you had not changed working directory you may be able to then look at all of the pdf files. You can get information with file,info()
?file.info
>
> I hope that makes my question clearer.
>
> Regards,
> Andreas
>
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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA
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