As part of a larger script, I need to move all <.csv> files from one directory to another. I wrote a simple script to do it, and was working fine, but for some reason, it is not working now, and I am going nuts trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
The code is:
rawPath <- "./test_dir1" dataPath <- "./test_dir2" dataFiles <- dir(rawPath, "*.csv", ignore.case = TRUE, all.files = TRUE) file.copy(dataFiles, dataPath, overwrite = TRUE ) But I get the following error:
Warning messages:
1: In file.copy(dataFiles, dataPath, overwrite = TRUE) : problem copying .\test_dir1\11085.lis.csv to C:\Users\Desktop\test_dir2\11085.lis.csv: No such file or directory
One error message for each file
Please, find trial directories and files that are a simplified version of what I have in the following link:
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
1 Answer
Your problem is that you have extracted the file names relative to rawPath, and then are trying to use that in file.copy while you're in a different directory. Running your code, look at dataFiles:
dataFiles # [1] "11085.lis.csv" "13087.lis.csv" "17089.lis.csv" "5081.lis.csv" "7083.lis.csv" You want
file.copy(paste(rawPath, dataFiles, sep = .Platform$file.sep), dataPath, overwrite = TRUE) # [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE Or alternatively:
file.copy(file.path(rawPath, dataFiles), dataPath, overwrite = TRUE) # [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE To reproduce:
dir.create("test_dir1") dir.create("test_dir2") files <- paste0(c(5081, 7083, 11085, 13087, 17089), ".lis.csv") file.create(paste("test_dir1", files, sep = .Platform$file.sep)) # [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE dir("test_dir1") # [1] "11085.lis.csv" "13087.lis.csv" "17089.lis.csv" "5081.lis.csv" "7083.lis.csv" dir("test_dir2") # character(0) rawPath <- "./test_dir1" dataPath <- "./test_dir2" dataFiles <- dir(rawPath, "*.csv", ignore.case = TRUE, all.files = TRUE) # To reproduce the error: file.copy(dataFiles, dataPath, overwrite = TRUE ) # To run without error: file.copy(file.path(rawPath, dataFiles), dataPath, overwrite = TRUE) 
