On Wed, 25 Apr 2007, Peter Dalgaard wrote: > Ernest Turro wrote: >> It seems unlink doesn't work with wildcards in 2.5.0. I've tried >> R-2.5.0 under gnu/linux from source and the Mac binary from att >> research. Example: >> >> > dir() >> [1] "bgx.Rnw" "bgx.pdf" "run.1" >> > unlink("run.*",recursive=T) >> > dir() >> [1] "bgx.Rnw" "bgx.pdf" "run.1" >> > unlink("run.1",recursive=T) >> > dir() >> [1] "bgx.Rnw" "bgx.pdf" >> >> > Yes. The argument is now passed through shQuote, and that has the side > effect of removing wildcard expansions. If this was intentional, someone > forgot to change the help page... > > Presumably, the change was done to prevent issues with embedded spaces:
NEWS says: o unlink() on Unix-alikes failed for paths containing spaces. > unlink("Program Files") would otherwise delete "Program" and "Files". It > is not obvious to me how this can be achieved while retaining wildcard > expansion. By using Sys.glob(), but it never got done and no one using pre-2.5.0 reported this so presumably few people use it. I'll put a fix in 2.5.0 patched shortly. There is the following comment in the R source file ##--- The following should/could really be done in C [platform !] : unlink <- function(x, recursive = FALSE) { and that would be a better idea (the Windows version is in C). -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel