Check existence of directory and create if doesn't exist

I often find myself writing R scripts that generate a lot of output. I find it cleaner to put this output into it's own directory(s). What I've written below will check for the existence of a directory and move into it, or create the directory and then move into it. Is there a better way to approach this?

mainDir <- "c:/path/to/main/dir"
subDir <- "outputDirectory"

if (file.exists(subDir)){
    setwd(file.path(mainDir, subDir))
} else {
    dir.create(file.path(mainDir, subDir))
    setwd(file.path(mainDir, subDir))

}

Solution 1:

Use showWarnings = FALSE:

dir.create(file.path(mainDir, subDir), showWarnings = FALSE)
setwd(file.path(mainDir, subDir))

dir.create() does not crash if the directory already exists, it just prints out a warning. So if you can live with seeing warnings, there is no problem with just doing this:

dir.create(file.path(mainDir, subDir))
setwd(file.path(mainDir, subDir))

Solution 2:

As of April 16, 2015, with the release of R 3.2.0 there's a new function called dir.exists(). To use this function and create the directory if it doesn't exist, you can use:

ifelse(!dir.exists(file.path(mainDir, subDir)), dir.create(file.path(mainDir, subDir)), FALSE)

This will return FALSE if the directory already exists or is uncreatable, and TRUE if it didn't exist but was succesfully created.

Note that to simply check if the directory exists you can use

dir.exists(file.path(mainDir, subDir))

Solution 3:

Here's the simple check, and creates the dir if doesn't exists:

## Provide the dir name(i.e sub dir) that you want to create under main dir:
output_dir <- file.path(main_dir, sub_dir)

if (!dir.exists(output_dir)){
dir.create(output_dir)
} else {
    print("Dir already exists!")
}

Solution 4:

One-liner:

if (!dir.exists(output_dir)) {dir.create(output_dir)}

Example:

dateDIR <- as.character(Sys.Date())
outputDIR <- file.path(outD, dateDIR)
if (!dir.exists(outputDIR)) {dir.create(outputDIR)}