| unlink {base} | R Documentation |
unlink deletes the file(s) or directories specified by x.
unlink(x, recursive = 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? |
If recursive = FALSE directories are not deleted,
not even empty ones.
On most platforms ‘file’ includes symbolic links, fifos and sockets. Some earlier versions of R would bot try to remove broken symbolic links.
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. 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.
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.
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.