Thanks Sarah, I suspected something like that but am still gropping around in Linux. I vaguely remember how to cd to someplace. Shades of DOS 3.2! Of was that Unixor both!
Also I think I was trying to be a bit too smart-alecky in where I was placing my data folder so I moved it to my home folder to simplify figuring out the path. Still thinking in Windows terms. After a bit of trial and error: jjohn@john-K53U:~$ cd /home/john/rdata john@john-K53U:~/rdata$ dir tti.csv john@john-K53U:~/rdata$ pwd /home/john/rdata so mydata <- read.csv("/home/john/rdata/tti.csv", header = TRUE) works just fine. I like the idea of staying with absolute paths. I am most appreciative. John Kane Kingston ON Canada > -----Original Message----- > From: sarah.gos...@gmail.com > Sent: Thu, 3 May 2012 12:29:14 -0400 > To: jrkrid...@inbox.com > Subject: Re: [R] Cannot read or write to file in Linux Ubuntu > > Hi John, > > You're probably messing up the path, just as you suspect. > > If you use a relative path, like you are doing, then R looks for that > location starting at R's current working directory, visible with > getwd(). For linux, that's the location at which you started R if you > started it from a terminal. > > The safest solution is to use an absolute path, which will likely be > something resembling "/home/john/DATA/... etc" - note that it will > always start with a / and go from there. > > If you know how to start a terminal window and cd to where your file > is, pwd at the command prompt will give you the absolute path to that > location, which is what you should be using until you get more > comfortable with the file system. > > The error message means that R can't find the directory you're telling > it to use. > > Sarah > > On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:21 PM, John Kane <jrkrid...@inbox.com> wrote: >> I am the proud owner of a new laptop since my old one died the other >> day. >> Currently I have a dual-boot Windows 7 Home and Ubuntu 12.04 . I'll >> leave the Windows problems for another post. >> >> I know practically nothing about Linux so I am probably doing something >> stupid but ... at the moment I cannot seem read or write files in >> Ubuntu. I am not having any problem saving other documents to the hard >> drive and R , from my few simple tests, seems to be working okay >> otherwise. >> >> At the moment I am trying : >> >> mydata <- read.csv("DATA/media/DATA/rdata/tt1.csv", header = TRUE) >> or >> mydata <- read.csv("DATA/rdata/tt1.csv", header = TRUE) >> >> >> where tt1.csv is a text file on what, from my reading of the path listed >> in gedit is >> DATA/media/DATA/rdata >> >> The csv data is simply: >> aa, bb >> 2, 3 >> 4, 5 >> >> What happens: >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >> 1> mydata <- read.csv("DATA/rdata/tt1.csv", header = TRUE) >> Error in file(file, "rt") : cannot open the connection >> In addition: Warning message: >> In file(file, "rt") : >> cannot open file 'DATA/rdata/tt1.csv': No such file or directory >> >> Am I totally screwing up the path? Or doing something else equally >> stupid? >> >> BTW I realise that 2.15 is out but Ubuntu as of yesterday did not have >> it in the repositories and I have yet to figure out how to install it >> from a CRAN site. >> >> 1> sessionInfo() >> R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22) >> Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit) >> >> locale: >> [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C >> [3] LC_TIME=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8 >> [5] LC_MONETARY=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8 >> [7] LC_PAPER=C LC_NAME=C >> [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C >> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C >> >> attached base packages: >> [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base > > -- > Sarah Goslee > http://www.functionaldiversity.org ____________________________________________________________ FREE 3D EARTH SCREENSAVER - Watch the Earth right on your desktop! ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.