Create a uniquely named directory. Appends number & optionally date to directory name.

Checks if the requested directory exists. If so, will create new directory name. My favorite method is to have the target directory with a date-based subdirectory, but set usedate as FALSE if you don't like that. Arguments showWarnings, recursive, and mode are passed along to R's dir.create, which does the actual work here.

Usage

dir.create.unique(
  path,
  usedate = TRUE,
  showWarnings = TRUE,
  recursive = TRUE,
  mode = "0777"
)

Arguments

path

A character string for the base name of the directory.

usedate

TRUE or FALSE: Insert YYYYMMDD information?

showWarnings

default TRUE. Show warnings? Will be passed on to dir.create

recursive

default TRUE. Will be passed on to dir.create

mode

Default permissions on unix-alike systems. Will be passed on to dir.create

Value

a character string with the directory name

Details

Default response to dir = "../output/" fixes the directory name like this, "../output/20151118-1/" because usedate is assumed TRUE. If usedate = FALSE, then output names will be like "../output-1/", "../output-2/", and so forth.

Author

Paul E Johnson pauljohn@ku.edu