unlink Delete Files and Directories

Description

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

Usage

unlink(x, recursive = FALSE, force = FALSE, expand = TRUE)

Arguments

x	a character vector with the names of the file(s) or directories to be deleted.
recursive	logical. Should directories be deleted recursively?
force	logical. Should permissions be changed (if possible) to allow the file or directory to be removed?
expand	logical. Should wildcards (see ‘Details’ below) and tilde (see path.expand) be expanded?

Details

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 just the symbolic link if the target of such a link is a directory.

Wildcard expansion (normally ‘*’ and ‘?’ are allowed) 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.

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

file.remove.