Change path.expand location (Win 7)

Question

Currently:

path.expand("~")

Gives:

"C:\\Users\\trinker\\Documents"

I want it to yield:

"C:\\Users\\trinker"

The directory for the windows command prompt is C:\Users\trinker. This indicates that this is my windows home directory.

?path.expand tells me to look at the rw-FAQ (LINK). This gives information above my cognitive ability. I decided to try to experiment as below:

> Sys.getenv("R_USER")
[1] "C:\\Users\\trinker\\Documents"
> normalizePath("~")
[1] "C:\\Users\\trinker\\Documents"

> Sys.getenv("R_USER") <- "C:\\Users\\trinker"
Error in Sys.getenv("R_USER") <- "C:\\Users\\trinker" : 
  target of assignment expands to non-language object
> normalizePath("~") <- "C:\\Users\\trinker"
Error in normalizePath("~") <- "C:\\Users\\trinker" : 
  target of assignment expands to non-language object 

I saw:

Sys.setenv(...)
Sys.unsetenv(x)

But got scared I was messing with things I ought not be blindly messing with and decided to ask for guidance.

So again I would like to have ~ mean C:\\Users\\trinker\\ again (this was the default for my last PC) not the C:\\Users\\trinker\\Documents it is now.

Answer 1

Another option is to update the 'target' string in the shortcut you use to launch a new R session. To to that, right click the icon, and select "Properties" from the context menu. Select the "Shortcut" tab of the dialog box, and add one the following name/value pairs to the target field.

R_USER="c:\my\favorite\folder"
R_USER="%USERPROFILE%"

Now path.expand("~") will expand to c:\my\favorite\folder or to c:\users\my name\.

A couple of notes.

• This will also change where R looks for user files such as .Rprofile,Rconsole, and user package library.
• If you've pinned R to your taskbar, you need to right click the task bar Icon to find the shortcut icon which launches R from the taskbar (pictured below):

Answer 2

Our sysadmin has setup the system in such a way that path.expand("~") or normalizePath("~") always lead to a mapped drive (\...). Creating a ".Renviron " file within the folder pointed by path.expand("~") with following content solved the problem for me :)

R_USER="C:/Users/animeshs"
HOME="C:/Users/animeshs"

So now

path.expand("~")

[1] "C:/Users/animeshs"