Hello, Amos, I came across this posting because I had a similar problem using R for mapping within GNU Emacs Org Mode on GNU/Linux. I work on a research team that uses a shared directory for data analysis. This makes it imperative to use relative pathnames so that everyone can use the exact same code, the exact same way, and achieve the exact same result. Unfortunately, the readOGR function in the rgdal package does not allow the use of relative pathnames in the dsn (data source name) argument.
To get around this, I use the setwd and getwd functions. I use setwd to set the working directory to the directory with the shapefile. Then, I use the getwd function as the dsn argument. Since setwd() can handle relative pathnames and getwd() prints the absolute pathname, this allows the user a way around the dsn= argument requiring an absolute pathname. This worked for my research team and allowed us all to use the same code for mapping in R. My R code looks something like this: ## SET WORKING DIRECTORY TO BE UNIFORM setwd("~/relative/path/to/file/nypp_15c/") ## IMPORT THE SHAPEFILE TO A SPATIAL DATA.FRAME library(rgdal) precincts.2015 <- readOGR( dsn=getwd(), layer="nypp") I would like to thank all the R developers, in particular Professor Bivand, for their extremely useful contributions in creating software for geospatial data analysis. I hope this helps, Adam G. Fera -- Adam G. Fera, MPhil Doctoral Student Instructor, NYPD Executive MA Police Leadership Program Research Analyst, Misdemeanor Justice Project PhD Program in Criminal Justice John Jay College of Criminal Justice 524 West 59th Street New York NY 10019 adamfer...@gmail.com [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo