Handling Double Quotes when creating soft links

Question

I am trying to create some soft links with R and I am having a hard time with the single and double quotes.

Currently, I am doing this: system(paste("mklink /d '", paste0(softlink,"/input_data"),"' '", Inputfolder, "'", sep=""))

Where:

softlink = "D:/users/target" and Inputfolder = "D:/users/input_data/"

However, when I am running it, it gives an error: "Running command 'mklink... had status 127'. Thus, I would like to get the following line, as I think this way it would work.

"mklink /d "D:/users/target/input_data" "D:/users/input_data/""

Unfortunately, whatever I have tried so far could not handle these quotes inside quotes. Could someone please help me to obtain the wanted line?

Thank you in advance.

Double quotes can be add by using `\"`. – A Gore Jun 12 '17 at 13:04 — A Gore, Jun 12 '17 at 13:04

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 12 '17 at 13:06

2

Try something like:

path1 <- file.path(softlink, "/input_data")
path2 <- file.path(Inputfolder)
sprintf("mklink /d %s %s", normalizePath(path1), normalizePath(path2))

answered Jun 12 '17 at 13:06

CPak

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Unfortunately this doesn't work. It just doubles the / . – Reider Ladislau Jun 12 '17 at 16:10
Instead of system(), try shell(). Does it give an error? You might need to run R with administrator privileges()... – CPak Jun 12 '17 at 17:37
I tried it, and it gives the same error unfortunately. I opened RStudio as an admin. Besides that, do I need to do anything to run R as an admin? – Reider Ladislau Jun 13 '17 at 07:00

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 12 '17 at 13:09

1

The standard way is to escape quotation marks:

system(paste("mklink /d \"", paste0(softlink,"/input_data"),"\" \"", Inputfolder, "\"", sep=""))

answered Jun 12 '17 at 13:09

psychOle

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Thank you for your answer. I have tried this method already but then I will get the following thing as a result of the outer paste: "mklink /d \"D:/users/target/input_data/\" \"D:/users/input_data/\"" and if I apply a system to this it will not create the soft links. – Reider Ladislau Jun 12 '17 at 15:55
How could I delete these unnecessary \s?:) – Reider Ladislau Jun 12 '17 at 16:12
Just a thought: Your are on Windows, right? Shouldn't it be `D:\users\input_data\ ` then (mind the backward slashes)? Besides, if you don't have spaces in your directories, you don't need any `"` at all, imho. – psychOle Jun 12 '17 at 16:52
Yes, I am on Windows, I tried the shell command as well but still it doesn't work. It gives execution failed with error code 1. About the backward slashes, that was the first way I tried with D:\users\input_data\ as this is how I can manually create the soft links from the cmd, but it doesn't work from R. I am starting to think that is is a problem with admin privileages. DO you have any idea how I could solve this issue? – Reider Ladislau Jun 13 '17 at 06:54
Well, mklink need admin rights ([see here](https://superuser.com/questions/124679/how-do-i-create-a-link-in-windows-7-home-premium-as-a-regular-user)). If it's a rights problem, you'd move over to [superuser](https://superuser.com). – psychOle Jun 13 '17 at 07:34
Well, just to be clear, I can create the softlinks using the cmd window, so I have the admin rights to create them. My problem is that I cannot create them from R. And as I have to create around 30.000 softlinks I would like to automate the process in R:) – Reider Ladislau Jun 13 '17 at 07:49

Handling Double Quotes when creating soft links

2 Answers2