Convenient directory handling in R - r

Question

Since I'm working with many subdirectories, I find setwd() pretty inconvient, as it demands from me to remember what are the current and previous location and change them back every time I perform different analysis. Things get more complicated when some paths need to be relative and other absolute.
I'm looking for a convenient way to apply the change for the specific fraction of code, as in Ruby:
Dir.chdir("newDir") do
# some code here #
end
I've written such ugly functions:
path = list()
tempDirNew <- function(..., abs= FALSE){
path$tempDir$old <<- getwd()
mod = ifelse(abs == TRUE,
'',
path$tempDir$old)
path$tempDir$new <<- file.path(mod, ...)
dir.create(path= path$tempDir$new, showWarnings= FALSE)
setwd(dir= file.path(path$tempDir$new))
}
tempDirOld <- function(){
setwd(dir= path$tempDir$old)
path$tempDir$new <- NULL
path$tempDir$old <- NULL
}
and apply tempDirNew('newdir') before and tempDirOld() after each part of the code.
But maybe there is some built-in, convenient way?

Answer 1

You might like that setwd returns the previous directory, so that you can do something like this in your functions:
f <- function(){
old <- setwd( "some/where" )
on.exit( setwd(old) )
# do something
}
This way, you don't mess with global variables, <<- etc ...

Answer 2

Why not just store your starting directory as a variable when you start and use it to reset your directory:
mydir <- getwd()
# do anything
# change directories
# do more stuff
# change directories
# yadda yadda yadda
setwd(mydir)
Also it sounds like you might want to leverage relative paths:
setwd('./subdir')
# do stuff, then go back:
setwd('../')