unlink
Delete Files and Directories
unlink deletes the file(s) or directories specified by x.
- Keywords
- file
Usage
unlink(x, recursive = FALSE, force = 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?
- force
- logical. Should permissions be changed (if possible) to allow the file or directory to be removed?
Details
Tilde-expansion (see path.expand) is done on x.
If recursive = FALSE directories are not deleted,
not even empty ones.
unix
On most platforms ‘file’ includes symbolic links, fifos and
sockets. Prior to R 2.15.0 unlink(x, recursive = TRUE) would
delete the contents of a directory target of a symbolic link: it now
only deletes the symbolic link (as unlink(x, recursive = FALSE)
always has).
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.
unix
Wildcards will only be expanded if the system supports it. Most
systems will support not only ‘*’ and ‘?’ but also character
classes such as ‘[a-z]’ (see the man pages for the system
call glob on your OS). 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. If
a metacharacter matches nothing it is considered as a literal
character.
recursive = TRUE might not be supported on all platforms, when it
will be ignored, with a warning: however there are no known current
examples.
Windows
Character classes such as ‘[a-z]’ are supported. The
metacharacter [ can occur in Windows filenames, and this makes
it difficult to use unlink to delete such files (see
file.remove). If a wildcard matches
nothing it is considered as a literal character.
Windows cannot remove the current working directory, nor any file which is open nor any directory containing such a file.
UTF-8-encoded paths not valid in the current locale can be used.
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
Community examples
Basic usage involves passing a character vector of paths to files that you would like to delete. ```r dir_to_clean <- tempdir() # or wherever #create some files to test it with some_files <- file.path( dir_to_clean, paste("test", 1:5, "txt", sep = ".") ) file.create(some_files) # Check that these files exist dir(dir_to_clean, full.names = TRUE) # Remove them unlink(some_files) # Check that they no longer exist dir(dir_to_clean, full.names = TRUE) ``` You can also use `?` to match any single character, or `*` to match multiple wildcard characters. See [`glob2rx()`](https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/utils/topics/glob2rx) for more info. This is especially useful for deleting all the files in a directory. ```r dir_to_clean <- tempdir() # or wherever #create some files to test it with some_files <- file.path( dir_to_clean, paste("test", 1:5, "txt", sep = ".") ) file.create(some_files) # Check that these files exist dir(dir_to_clean, full.names = TRUE) # Remove them unlink(file.path(dir_to_clean, "*")) # Check that they no longer exist dir(dir_to_clean, full.names = TRUE) ```