[R] delete content of directory - unlink doesn't work as expected

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Similar examples to yours work for me. Please tell us your OS and version 
of R, and, as the footer asks

PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


On Tue, 28 Nov 2006, Hans-Peter wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I try to delete the files in a directory. While the command
>
> invisible(lapply( list.files( "DeleteThis" ), function(x)
> file.remove(paste("DeleteThis", x, sep="/" )) ))

Oh, dear!  file.path() exists for a reason, and file.remove is 
vectorized.  Try

file.remove(dir("DeleteThis", full.names=TRUE))


> works, I keep thinking that there should be a more direct command.
>
> "unlink" looks like a good candidate but whith this I only arrive to
> either delete the whole directory or nothing happens at all. Code:
>
> file.exists( "DeleteThis" )        # TRUE: folder is here
>
> (unlink( "DeleteThis/*.*" ))             # 0, content doesn't get deleted
> (unlink( "DeleteThis/*" ))               # do.
> (unlink( "DeleteThis/*.*", TRUE ))  # do.
> (unlink( "DeleteThis/*", TRUE ))    # do.
>
> unlink( "DeleteThis", TRUE )  # whole folder will be deleted
>
> According to the help placeholders are allowed so I don't see where is 
> an error.
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595