list.files {base}

R Documentation

List the Files in a Directory/Folder

Description

These functions produce a character vector of the names of files or directories in the named directory.

Usage

list.files(path = ".", pattern = NULL, all.files = FALSE,
           full.names = FALSE, recursive = FALSE,
           ignore.case = FALSE, include.dirs = FALSE, no.. = FALSE)

       dir(path = ".", pattern = NULL, all.files = FALSE,
           full.names = FALSE, recursive = FALSE,
           ignore.case = FALSE, include.dirs = FALSE, no.. = FALSE)

list.dirs(path = ".", full.names = TRUE, recursive = TRUE)

Arguments

path	a character vector of full path names; the default corresponds to the working directory, getwd(). Tilde expansion (see path.expand) is performed. Missing values will be ignored. Elements with a marked encoding will be converted to the native encoding (and if that fails, considered non-existent).
pattern	an optional regular expression. Only file names which match the regular expression will be returned.
all.files	a logical value. If FALSE, only the names of visible files are returned (following Unix-style visibility, that is files whose name does not start with a dot). If TRUE, all file names will be returned.
full.names	a logical value. If TRUE, the directory path is prepended to the file names to give a relative file path. If FALSE, the file names (rather than paths) are returned.
recursive	logical. Should the listing recurse into directories?
ignore.case	logical. Should pattern-matching be case-insensitive?
include.dirs	logical. Should subdirectory names be included in recursive listings? (They always are in non-recursive ones).
no..	logical. Should both "." and ".." be excluded also from non-recursive listings?

Value

A character vector containing the names of the files in the specified directories (empty if there were no files). If a path does not exist or is not a directory or is unreadable it is skipped.

The files are sorted in alphabetical order, on the full path if full.names = TRUE.

list.dirs implicitly has all.files = TRUE, and if recursive = TRUE, the answer includes path itself (provided it is a readable directory).

dir is an alias for list.files.

Note

File naming conventions are platform dependent. The pattern matching works with the case of file names as returned by the OS.

On a POSIX filesystem recursive listings will follow symbolic links to directories.

Author(s)

Ross Ihaka, Brian Ripley

See Also

file.info, file.access and files for many more file handling functions and file.choose for interactive selection.

glob2rx to convert wildcards (as used by system file commands and shells) to regular expressions.

Sys.glob for wildcard expansion on file paths. basename and dirname, useful for splitting paths into non-directory (aka ‘filename’) and directory parts.

Examples

list.files(R.home())
## Only files starting with a-l or r
## Note that a-l is locale-dependent, but using case-insensitive
## matching makes it unambiguous in English locales
dir("../..", pattern = "^[a-lr]", full.names = TRUE, ignore.case = TRUE)

list.dirs(R.home("doc"))
list.dirs(R.home("doc"), full.names = FALSE)

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