[R] wildcards and removing variables

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 10/10/05, Marc Schwartz (via MN) <mschwartz at mn.rr.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 10:37 -0400, Afshartous, David wrote:
> >       All,
> >
> >       Is there are a wildcard in R for varible names as in unix?  For example,
> >
> >       rm(results*)
> >
> >       to remove all variable or function names that begin w/ "results"?
> >
> >       cheers,
> >       Dave
> >       ps - please respond directly to afshar at miami.edu
>
>
> See ?ls, which has a 'pattern' argument, enabling the use of Regex to
> define the objects to be listed and subsequently removed using rm().
>
> You can then use something like:
>
>  rm(list = ls(pattern = "\\bresults."))

Also, in R 2.2.0 (or look in sfsmisc package for older versions of R)
you can use glob2rx to get shell-style wildcards (aka globbing):

ls(pattern = glob2rx("results*"))