R.utils (version 2.8.0)

copyFile: Copies a file atomically

Description

Copies a file atomically, by first copying to a temporary file and then renaming that file.

Usage

# S3 method for default
copyFile(srcPathname, destPathname, skip=FALSE, overwrite=FALSE, ..., validate=TRUE,
  verbose=FALSE)

Arguments

srcPathname

The source file to be copied.

destPathname

The destination file to be created. If an existing directory, then the destination file becomes file.path(destPathname, basename(srcPathname)).

skip, overwrite

If a destination file does not exist, these arguments have no effect. If such a file exists and skip is TRUE, then no copying is attempted and FALSE is returned (indicating that no copying was made). If such a file exists, both skip and overwrite are FALSE then an exception is thrown. If a destination file exists, skip is FALSE and overwrite is TRUE, then it is overwritten and TRUE is returned. If the copying/overwriting failed, for instance due to non sufficient file permissions, an informative exception is thrown.

...

Additional named arguments passed to file.copy(). Non-named or unknown arguments are ignored.

validate

If TRUE, validation of the copied file is applied, otherwise not.

verbose

See Verbose.

Value

Returns a logical indicating whether a successful file copy was completed or not, or equivalently. In other words, TRUE is returned if the file was successfully copied, and FALSE if not. If an error occurs, an informative exception is thrown. If the error occurs while renaming the temporary file to the final name, the temporary file will remain in the destination directory.

Details

If the source file does not exists (or is not a file), then an informative exception is thrown.

If the source and destination pathnames are the same, it is not safe to copy (which can lead to either corrupt or lost files) and an informative exception is thrown.

If (and only if) the file is successfully copied and argument validate is TRUE, then this method also asserts that the file size of the destination matches that of the source, otherwise an informative exception is thrown.

See Also

file.copy().