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Miscellaneous

unlink

R Base 3.6.2

unlink deletes the file(s) or directories specified by x.

Syntax

R 
unlink(x, recursive = FALSE, force = FALSE)

Arguments

Parameter Description
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?

Return 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.

Details

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), al

See Also

file.remove.