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 path.expand) be expanded?

Details

If recursive = FALSE directories are not deleted, not even empty ones.

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.

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.

See Also

file.remove.


[Package base version 4.0.3 Index]