unlink deletes the file(s) or directories specified by x.unlink(x, recursive = FALSE, force = FALSE)* and ?) are allowed.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.path.expand) is done on x. If recursive = FALSE directories are not deleted,
not even empty ones. On most platforms ‘file’ includes symbolic links, fifos and
sockets. Prior to R 2.15.0 unlink(x, recursive = TRUE) would
delete the contents of a directory target of a symbolic link: it now
only deletes the symbolic link (as unlink(x, recursive = FALSE)
always has). Wildcard expansion is done by the internal code of
Sys.glob. Wildcards never match a leading . in
the filename, and files . and .. will never be
considered for deletion.
Wildcards will only be expanded if the system supports it. Most
systems will support not only * and ? but also character
classes such as [a-z] (see the man pages for the system
call glob on your OS). The metacharacters * ? [ can
occur in Unix filenames, and this makes it difficult to use
unlink to delete such files (see file.remove),
although escaping the metacharacters by backslashes usually works. If
a metacharacter matches nothing it is considered as a literal
character. recursive = TRUE might not be supported on all platforms, when it
will be ignored, with a warning: however there are no known current
examples.
Character classes such as [a-z] are supported. The
metacharacter [ can occur in Windows filenames, and this makes
it difficult to use unlink to delete such files (see
file.remove). If a wildcard matches
nothing it is considered as a literal character. Windows cannot remove the current working directory, nor any file
which is open nor any directory containing such a file. UTF-8-encoded paths not valid in the current locale can be used.file.remove.