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 will only be expanded if the system supports it.

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 2.7.1 Index]