How to remove a directory in R?

Question

After some research I found out that the following works:

unlink(\"mydir\")

and you have to use the recursive option in case you w

Answer 1

Simply

unlink("mydir") # will delete directory called 'mydir'

Answer 2

For those stumbling on this, I normally resort to using 'shell' command here to completely delete the folder.

Using 'system' will print a 127 error if the folder is non-empty.

The following is the simple nuclear option - deleting the folder in its entirety (no questions asked):

Loc <- "C:/file has spaces/hence the form below/"
shell( glue::glue("rmdir /s /q \"{Loc}\" ") )

Answer 3

Here's a wrapper function for you if you really need to see an error msg:

.unlink <- function(x, recursive = FALSE, force = FALSE) {
  if (unlink(x, recursive, force) == 0)
    return(invisible(TRUE))
  stop(sprintf("Failed to remove [%s]", x))
}

Answer 4

See help ?unlink:

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.

In the case where there is a folder foo the unlink call without recursive=TRUE will return 1.

Note that actually the behavior is more like rm -f, which means that unlinking a non-existent file will return 0.