Hi David, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net> writes:
> On May 14, 2014, at 3:44 PM, Andreas Leha wrote: > >> Hi David, >> >> Thank you for following up on that. >> >> David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net> writes: >> >>> On May 14, 2014, at 3:04 PM, Andreas Leha wrote: >>> >>>> Hi all, >>>> >>>> how do I find out about the filename, the currently open (let's say pdf) >>>> device is writing to? >>>> >>>> If I find 'dev.cur()' returning 'pdf 3' when I expect 'nulldevice 1' I >>>> would like to know, which file that pdf device is actually targeting. >>>> >>>> Any help for my poor organization is highly appreciated... >>>> >>> >>> Have your read the help file for pdf()? The first argument is the default >>> naming mechanism: >>> >>> file = ifelse(onefile, "Rplots.pdf", "Rplot%03d.pdf") >>> >>> So if you call pdf() then it will write to the working directory with a >>> named constructed from those choices. >>> >> >> Sorry for being unclear. I am aware of that. My use case is, that >> apparently, I have called pdf("somefile.pdf") somewhen during a long >> lasting R session. >> >> I tend to have separate R sessions open in parallel >> for the project I am working on. So, I can easily have R session open >> that run for weeks. >> >> So, when I return to an R session (when I got some additional data, I >> was asking for, e.g.) after several days, I do not know what that call >> was. And for several reasons, the actual call (pdf("somefile.pdf")) >> might not even be visible in my R session. >> >> In that situation, I would like to know, which is the open file for the >> current device. > > Well, if you acheived success with the pdf() call by executing > dev.off() then you closed that device. The previous device does leave > behind a footprint but not the entire name of hte file or the > contents. > > ?dev.prev > >> old.dev <-dev.prev() >> str(old.dev) > Named int 5 > - attr(*, "names")= chr "pdf" > > > If you had not changed working directory you may be able to then look > at all of the pdf files. You can get information with file,info() > > ?file.info > > Thanks for the follow-up. I take it, there is no 'easy' way in R to achieve this. The best solution (on unix systems) that I have come up with is this: system(paste("lsof -p", Sys.getpid(), "| grep pdf")) (which obviously works only before dev.off()) I was hoping for some more reliable way to achieve this, but it'll work for me. Thanks again, Andreas ______________________________________________ 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.