R: Delete Files and Directories

unlink {base} | R Documentation

## Delete Files and Directories

### Description

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

### Usage

    unlink(x, recursive = FALSE, force = 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?
`force` | logical. Should permissions be changed (if possible) to allow the file or directory to be removed?

### 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. Prior to R 2.15.0 `unlink(x, recursive = TRUE)` would delete the contents of a directory target of a symbolic link: it now only deletes the symbolic link (as `unlink(x, recursive = FALSE)` always has).

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.

### 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`.

[Package base version 2.15.1 Index]