Download a file into my working directory

Question

I would like to download a file directly into my working directory I can do this to a temp directory: download.file("http://www.abc.com/abc.zip",temp) but what do I have to replace temp with to get it to download to the working directory?

Answer 1

If your url is in a variable, you can use basename to get the "filename" part out of it:

u <- "http://www.abc.com/abc.zip"
basename(u) # "abc.zip"

# downloads to current directory:
download.file(u, basename(u))

# downloads to subdirectory "foo":
download.file(u, file.path("foo", basename(u)))

Answer 2

The second argument of download.file() is destfile and it must be specified. I don't have a Windows machine to test this on, but both of these work on my linux box and I can't see why at least the second won't work on Windows too:

download.file("http://www.abc.com/abc.zip", "./abc.zip")
download.file("http://www.abc.com/abc.zip", "abc.zip")

The second of those indicates that if you just give a filename, the file will be download to the current working directory and saved under the stated name.