title: Read in all shapefiles in a directory in R into memory
body: <p>I would like to read all shapefiles in a directory into the global environment However, when I get a list of files in my working directory, the list includes both .shp and .shp.xml files, the latter of which I do not want. My draft code reads both .shp and .shp.xml files. How can I prevent it from doing so? </p>
  
  <p>Draft code follows: </p>
  
  <p>library(maptools) </p>
  
  <pre><code># get all files with the .shp extension from working directory
  setwd("N:/Dropbox/_BonesFirst/139_Transit_Metros_Points_Subset_by_R")
  shps &lt;- dir(getwd(), "*.shp")
  # the assign function will take the string representing shp
  # and turn it into a variable which holds the spatial points data 
  for (shp in shps) {
    cat("now loading", shp, "...", '\n\r')
    assign(shp, readOGR(shp)) 
                    }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>EDIT: Problems seems to be in the readShapePoints. Either readOGR (from rgdal) or shapefile (from raster) work better. </p>