| unlink {base} | R Documentation |
unlink deletes the file(s) or directories specified by x.
unlink(x, recursive = FALSE, force = FALSE)
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? |
Tilde-expansion (see path.expand) is done on x.
If recursive = FALSE directories are not deleted,
not even empty ones.
On most platforms ‘file’ includes symbolic links, fifos and
sockets. unlink(x, recursive = TRUE)
deletes the just symbolic link if the target of such a link is a directory.
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 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.
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.
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.