What is '.R' folder and where to look for it?

Question

I am a beginner in R. I use Rstudio on my MAC OSX.

I have no idea what does this mean 'create a folder ~/.R and put a Makevars in it.'

I went word by word and tried creating '.R' in my home(~) directory. MAC doesnt allow it saying "You can’t use a name that begins with a dot “.”, because these names are reserved for the system. Please choose another name." ( of course!)

Next I tried to look for .R folder, hoping that it might already be there. But couldn't find it anywhere.

Can anyone please explain where is this '.R' folder on our system? Or how is the whole R folder hierarchy is built.

I tried doing this:

path2 = normalizePath("~/.R")

Warning message:

In normalizePath("~/.R") : path[1]="/Users/as82986/.R": No such file or directory

setwd(path2)

Error in setwd(path2) : cannot change working directory

Problem is I couldn't even find anything on google because looking for '.R' folder threw pretty vague and unrelated results.

Also, would appreciate if I am not directed to any more documentations. Please. And thank you so much for helping me.

Answer 1

You need to use the Terminal.app to open a Unix console and then type:

$ mkdir ~/.R

The dollar sign is there to remind you that this is not the R console which has a ">" prompt. (Do not type the "$".) You are going to need to learn a few more lessons about the Unix commands if you plan to compile packages from source. I generally run my Finder with ShowAllFiles set to Yes. Do a google search if that is not meaningful to you.