I would like to thank everyone for their insightful responses to the directory
question. It's people like you that make this news group a great resource.
To summarize: Most everyone creates a .Data directories off the unix directories
This seems to fit with the Splus strategy to have only Splus objects in .Data
directories. As for changing directories, most people leave splus and start
up again in the directory they want to change to. Another method is to use the
attach function to get access to the data in another directory. If you attach
with pos=1 then any objects that you write will be placed in that directory. I
have a cd("directory path") function that will check the search list to see if
the "directory path" is their. If it is not found then the "directory path" is
simply placed in the first position of the search list. If it is found it is
deleted from it's current position before being placed in the first position. It also changes the prompt in splus to reflect what directory you are currently in. If any one is interested in this function let me know and I will be happy to
give them a copy. I will conclude with Bill Dunlap's reply from statistical
Sciences, Inc. Again thanks for all the replies.
Tony Scalise
scalise@alnitak.kodak.com
Eastman Kodak Co.
Rochester, New York
Bill's Reply:
Our model of the .Data directory is that it contains only objects
that Splus knows about. Mainly these are the binary data files,
but Splus uses directories named .Help and .Cat.Help for help
files, a file called .Audit to contain a history of Splus commands
and other things, and the soon to be released Splus 3.1 for DOS
has some other special files there.
If you add things to .Data you will confuse Splus. We recommend
making a new ordinary directory and a .Data subdirectory of it
to hold a new project's data.
> I try moving to a different
> directory by !cd directory_name but after when I try !pwd the directory hasn't
> been changed.
Every time you execute a unix shell command, it spawns a new subshell,
and the subshell dies at the end of the command. When the subshell
starts using a new directory it does not cause its parent shell to do
so.
You should either leave Splus, cd to the new directory, and start
it up again, or attach("newdirectory/.Data") to get access to the
