This help topic is for R version 2.9.0. For the current version of R, try https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/Sys.glob.html
Sys.glob {base}R Documentation

Wildcard Expansion on File Paths

Description

Function to do wildcard expansion (also known as ‘globbing’) on file paths.

Platforms are not required to support this, but all knoen current R platforms do.

Usage

Sys.glob(paths, dirmark = FALSE)

Arguments

paths

character vector of patterns for relative or absolute filepaths. Missing values will be ignored.

dirmark

logical: should matches to directories from patterns that do not already end in / have a slash appended? May not be supported on all platforms.

Details

This expands wildcards in file paths. For precise details, see your system's documentation on the glob system call. There is a POSIX 1003.2 standard (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/glob.html) but some OSes will go beyond this. The R implementation will always do tilde-expansion (see path.expand).

All systems should interpret * (match zero or more characters), ? (match a single character) and (probably) [ (begin a character class or range). If a filename starts with . this must be matched explicitly. By default paths ending in / will be accepted and matched only to directories.

The rest of these details are indicative (and based on the POSIX standard).

[ begins a character class. If the first character in [...] is not !, this is a character class which matches a single character against any of the characters specified. The class cannot be empty, so ] can be included provided it is first. If the first character is !, the character class matches a single character which is none of the specified characters.

Character classes can include ranges such as [A-Z]: include - as a character by having it first or last in a class. (The interpretation of ranges should be locale-specific, so the example is not a good idea in an Estonian locale.)

One can remove the special meaning of ?, * and [ by preceding them by a backslash (except within a character class).

Value

A character vector of matched file paths. The order is system-specific (but in the order of the elements of paths): it is normally collated in either the current locale or in byte (ASCII) order.

Directory errors are normally ignored, so the matches are to accessible file paths (but not necessarily accessible files).

On platforms which do not have the glob system call, paths is returned unchanged.

See Also

path.expand.

Quotes for handling backslashes in character strings.

Examples

## Not run: 
Sys.glob(file.path(R.home(), "library", "*", "R", "*.rdx"))

## End(Not run)

[Package base version 2.9.0 ]