# What Do I Use R for? (1)

### 谢益辉 / 2007-05-04

I decide to write down some interesting daily work I do with R from today on. In the past, there’ve been many times that I wanted to get a file list containing all the files in a certain directory (folder), but I find it difficult without a special software. Actually it’s extremely easy in R; just use the function list.files(), e.g.

> list.files("C:\\Documents and Settings\\Yihui Xie\\Desktop")
....
[3] Copula Structure Analysis Based on Robust and - Extreme Dependence Measures.pdf
[4] Copulae and Their Uses (2002).pdf
[5] Copulas and Credit Models (2001).pdf
[6] Correlation--Pitfalls and Alternatives (1999).pdf
[7] Correlation And Dependence In Risk Management--Properties And Pitfalls (1999).pdf
[8] Estimation Of Copula Models For Time Series Of Possibly Different Lengths (2001).pdf
[9] Estimation Procedures for a Semiparametric Family of Bivariate Copulas.pdf
[10] Financial Risk and Heavy Tails (2002).pdf
....


Sure we may write the result into a file. (Use write.table(), write.csv(), etc.) For Windows users, choose.dir() might be a helpful function to get the path of a folder, so we may as well use list.files(choose.dir()).