| unlink {base} | R Documentation |
Delete Files and Directories
Description
unlink deletes the file(s) or directories specified by x.
Usage
unlink(x, recursive = FALSE, force = FALSE, expand = TRUE)Arguments
x |
a character vector with the names of the file(s) or directories to be deleted. |
recursive |
logical. Should directories be deleted recursively? |
force |
logical. Should permissions be changed (if possible) to allow the file or directory to be removed? |
expand |
logical. Should wildcards (see ‘Details’ below) and
tilde (see |
Details
If recursive = FALSE directories are not deleted,
not even empty ones.
On most platforms ‘file’ includes symbolic links, fifos and
sockets. unlink(x, recursive = TRUE)
deletes just the symbolic link if the target of such a link is a directory.
Wildcard expansion (normally ‘*’ and ‘?’ are allowed) is done by
the internal code of Sys.glob. Wildcards never match a
leading ‘.’ in the filename, and files ‘.’, ‘..’ and
‘~’ will never be considered for deletion.
Wildcards will only be expanded if the system supports it. Most
systems will support not only ‘*’ and ‘?’ but also character
classes such as ‘[a-z]’ (see the man pages for the system
call glob on your OS). The metacharacters * ? [ can
occur in Unix filenames, and this makes it difficult to use
unlink to delete such files (see file.remove),
although escaping the metacharacters by backslashes usually works. If
a metacharacter matches nothing it is considered as a literal
character.
recursive = TRUE might not be supported on all platforms, when it
will be ignored, with a warning: however there are no known current
examples.
Value
0 for success, 1 for failure, invisibly.
Not deleting a non-existent file is not a failure, nor is being unable
to delete a directory if recursive = FALSE. However, missing
values in x are regarded as failures.
References
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.