Setting working directory: Julia versus R

Question

In R, starting from any working directory, I can do

setwd("~/Desktop")

and this is consistent with how my linux distribution interprets cd at the command line. But Julia does not seem to recognize the ~/ notation:

julia> cd("~/Desktop")
ERROR: chdir ~/Desktop: No such file or directory
 in systemerror at error.jl:38
 in cd at file.jl:13

Is this a bug?

This seems to be relevant: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/1136 — Dason, Jul 19 '14 at 15:26

waTeim · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-19T15:09:34.887

43

The idiom is just different as you can see from the source. If you invoke cd() without arguments, it defaults to the home directory. The function homedir() can be used to prepend the home directory.

julia> homedir()
"/Users/jeffw"

julia> cd("/")

julia> pwd()
"/"

julia> cd()

julia> pwd()
"/Users/jeffw"

Combining things

julia> cd("$(homedir())/Desktop")

julia> pwd()
"/Users/jeffw/Desktop"

edited Jul 19 '14 at 15:09

answered Jul 19 '14 at 14:56

waTeim

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And if you want to change to a folder that is in the home directory? Like the OP is asking about? – Dason Jul 19 '14 at 15:04
7

`cd("$(homedir())/Desktop)` isn't portable, should be `cd(joinpath(homedir()),"Desktop"))` – IainDunning Jul 30 '14 at 22:15

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 19 '14 at 15:25

3

The problem is that Julia doesn't expand the ~. You need to manually provide the full path. This is being worked on, but I'm on my phone right now and can't find issue.

answered Jul 19 '14 at 15:25

IainDunning

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see @Dason's comment on the original post. – Ben Bolker Jul 19 '14 at 15:38

Setting working directory: Julia versus R

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