R: Delete Files and Directories

unlink {base} | R Documentation

## Delete Files and Directories

### Description

`unlink` deletes the file(s) or directories specified by `x`.

### Usage

    unlink(x, recursive = FALSE)

### Arguments

`x` | a character vector with the names of the file(s) or directories to be deleted. Wildcards (normally ‘*’ and ‘?’) are allowed.
`recursive` | logical. Should directories be deleted recursively?

### Details

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

On most platforms ‘file’ includes symbolic links, fifos and sockets.

Wildcard expansion 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 character classes such as ‘[a-z]’ (see the `man` pages for `glob`). 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. As from R 2.8.0, if a metacharacter matches nothing it is considered as a literal character.

`recursive = TRUE` is not supported on all platforms, and may be ignored, with a warning.

### Value

`0` for success, `1` for failure. 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` result 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 2.8.1 Index]