Automatically Delete Files/Folders
RFilePathDirectoryDelete FileR Problem Overview
Is there any way to automatically delete all files or folders with few R command lines?
I am aware of the unlink()
or file.remove()
functions, but for those you need to define a character vector with exactly all the names of the files you want to delete. I am looking more for something that lists all the files or folders within a specific path (e.g. 'C:/Temp') and then delete all files with a certain name (regardless of its extension).
Any help is very much appreciated!
R Solutions
Solution 1 - R
Maybe you're just looking for a combination of file.remove
and list.files
? Maybe something like:
do.call(file.remove, list(list.files("C:/Temp", full.names = TRUE)))
And I guess you can filter the list of files down to those whose names match a certain pattern using grep
or grepl
, no?
Solution 2 - R
For all files in a known path you can:
unlink("path/*")
Solution 3 - R
dir_to_clean <- tempdir() #or wherever
#create some junk to test it with
file.create(file.path(
dir_to_clean,
paste("test", 1:5, "txt", sep = ".")
))
#Now remove them (no need for messing about with do.call)
file.remove(dir(
dir_to_clean,
pattern = "^test\\.[0-9]\\.txt$",
full.names = TRUE
))
You can also use unlink
as an alternative to file.remove
.
Solution 4 - R
Using a combination of dir and grep this isn't too bad. This could probably be turned into a function that also tells you which files are to be deleted and gives you a chance to abort if it's not what you expected.
# Which directory?
mydir <- "C:/Test"
# What phrase do you want contained in
# the files to be deleted?
deletephrase <- "deleteme"
# Look at directory
dir(mydir)
# Figure out which files should be deleted
id <- grep(deletephrase, dir(mydir))
# Get the full path of the files to be deleted
todelete <- dir(mydir, full.names = TRUE)[id]
# BALEETED
unlink(todelete)
Solution 5 - R
To delete everything inside the folder, but keep the folder empty
unlink("path/*", recursive = T, force = T)
To delete everything inside the folder, and also delete the folder
unlink("path", recursive = T, force = T)
Use force = T
, to overwrite any read-only/hidden/etc. issues.
Solution 6 - R
I quite like here::here
for finding my way through folders (especially if I'm switching between inline evaluation and knit versions of an Rmarkdown notebook)... yet another solution:
# Batch remove files
# Match files in chosen directory with specified regex
files <- dir(here::here("your_folder"), "your_pattern")
# Remove matched files
unlink(paste0(here::here("your_folder"), files))