[R] Removing directory?

[James W. MacDonald]

I think you want to add a recursive = TRUE to your call to unlink().

Best,

Jim

Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to remove/delete a directory usingR.  I've tried the
> following with no success:
> 
> % Rterm --vanilla
> 
>>getwd()
> 
> [1] "C:/Documents and Settings/hb/braju.com.R/aroma.affymetrix/test"
> 
> 
>>dir.create("foo")
>>file.info("foo")
> 
>     size isdir mode               mtime               ctime               atime
> foo    0  TRUE  777 2007-02-28 14:52:10 2007-02-28 14:52:10 2007-02-28 14:52:10
> 
> # Using file.remove()
> 
>>res <- sapply(c("foo", "foo/", "foo\\", "./foo", "./foo/"), file.remove)
>>res
> 
>    foo   foo/  foo\\  ./foo ./foo/
>  FALSE  FALSE  FALSE  FALSE  FALSE
> 
> # Using unlink()
> 
>>res <- sapply(c("foo", "foo/", "foo\\", "./foo", "./foo/"), unlink)
>>res
> 
>    foo   foo/  foo\\  ./foo ./foo/
>      1      0      0      1      0
> 
> # Directory is still there
> 
>>file.info("foo")
> 
>     size isdir mode               mtime               ctime               atime
> foo    0  TRUE  777 2007-02-28 14:52:10 2007-02-28 14:52:10 2007-02-28 14:52:10
> 
> I've tried the above from a different directory too, i.e.
> setwd("C:/"), with no success.  Using absolute pathnames the same.
> 
> This is on WinXP R v2.4.1:
> 
> 
>>sessionInfo()
> 
> R version 2.4.1 Patched (2007-01-13 r40470)
> i386-pc-mingw32
> 
> locale:
> LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252;LC_MON
> ETARY=English_United States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
> 
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"     "datasets"  "methods"
> [7] "base"
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Henrik
> 
> ______________________________________________
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


-- 
James W. MacDonald
University of Michigan
Affymetrix and cDNA Microarray Core
1500 E Medical Center Drive
Ann Arbor MI 48109
734-647-5623



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