R: Return the R Home Directory

Rhome {base} | R Documentation

## Return the R Home Directory

### Description

Return the R home directory, or the full path to a component of the R installation.

### Usage

    R.home(component = "home")

### Arguments

`component` | As well as `"home"` which gives the R home directory, other known values are `"bin"`, `"doc"`, `"etc"`, `"include"`, `"modules"` and `"share"` giving the paths to the corresponding parts of an R installation.

### Details

The R home directory is the top-level directory of the R installation being run.

The R home directory is often referred to as R_HOME, and is the value of an environment variable of that name in an R session. It can be found outside an R session by `R RHOME`.

### Value

A character string giving the R home directory or path to a particular component. Normally the components are all subdirectories of the R home directory, but this need not be the case in a Unix-like installation.

The value for `"modules"` and on Windows `"bin"` is a sub-architecture-specific location.

On a Unix-alike, the constructed paths are based on the current values of the environment variables R_HOME and where set R_SHARE_DIR, R_DOC_DIR and R_INCLUDE_DIR (these are set on startup and should not be altered).

On Windows the values of `R.home()` and R_HOME are switched to the 8.3 short form of path elements if required and if the Windows service to do that is enabled. The value of R_HOME is set to use forward slashes (since many package maintainers pass it unquoted to shells, for example in ‘Makefile’s).

### See Also

`commandArgs()[1]` may provide related information.

### Examples

    ## These result quite platform dependently :
    rbind(home = R.home(),
          bin  = R.home("bin")) # often a sub directory of 'home'
    list.files(R.home("bin"))

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