file {base}R Documentation

File Manipulation

Description

These functions provide a very basic interface to the computer's filestore.

Usage

file.create(...)
file.exists(...)
file.remove(...)
file.append(file1, file2)
dir.create(path)
basename(path)
dirname(path)

Arguments

..., file1, file2, path character vectors, containing file names.

Details

The ... arguments are concatenated to form one character string: you can specify the files separately or as one vector.

file.create creates files with the given names if they do not already exist and truncates them if they do. It returns a logical vector indicating the success or failure of the operation for each file.

file.exists returns a logical vector indicating whether the files named by its argument exist.

file.remove attempts to remove the files named in its argument. It returns a logical vector indicating whether or not it succeeded in removing each file.

file.append attempts to append the files named by its second argument to those named by its first. The R subscript recycling rule is used to align names given in vectors of different lengths.

dir.create creates the last element of the path. It returns a logical, true for success.

basename removes all of the path up to the last path separator (if any).

dirname returns the part of the path up to (but excluding) the last path separator, or "." if there is no path separator.

In both basename and dirname trailing file separators are removed before dissecting the path, and for dirname any trailing file separators are removed from the result.

Author(s)

Ross Ihaka, Brian Ripley

See Also

file.show, list.files.

Examples

cat("file A\n", file="A")
cat("file B\n", file="B")
file.append("A", "B")
file.create("A")
file.append("A", rep("B", 10))
if(interactive()) file.show("A")

file.remove("A","B")

basename(file.path("","p1","p2","p3","filename"))
dirname(file.path("","p1","p2","p3","filename"))

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