It seems unlink doesn't work with wildcards in 2.5.0. I've tried R-2.5.0 under gnu/linux from source and the Mac binary from att research. Example: > dir() [1] "bgx.Rnw" "bgx.pdf" "run.1" > unlink("run.*",recursive=T) > dir() [1] "bgx.Rnw" "bgx.pdf" "run.1" > unlink("run.1",recursive=T) > dir() [1] "bgx.Rnw" "bgx.pdf" Cheers, Ernest