PS, I should have said that I'm reading the docs for unlink in R-2.10.0
on a Linux system. The docs that appear in a Windows installation of R
are different (the Windows docs do not mention that not all systems
support recursive=TRUE).
Here's a plea for docs to be uniform across all systems! Trying to
write R code that works on all systems is much harder when the docs are
different across systems, and you might only see system specific notes
on a different system than the one you're working on.
-- Tony Plate
Tony Plate wrote:
The VALUE section in the help for 'unlink' says:
| 0| for success, |1| for failure. 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| result are
regarded as failures.
The last phrase doesn't make sense to me. Should it be either
"missing values in x are regarded as failures" or "missing values in x
result in failure" ?
Also, after reading the docs, I'm still unable to work out if unlink()
will return 1 when the user tries to recursively delete a directory on
systems that don't support recursive=T.
The DETAILS section says "recursive=TRUE is not supported on all
platforms, and may be ignored, with a warning", which could be
interpreted as implying no special action when recursive=TRUE is not
implemented (other than a warning()), and the VALUE section doesn't
say what the return value will be under such conditions.
I've skimmed the various *_unlink functions in src/main/platform.c,
and it looks like they all implement recursive=TRUE, so I'm still in
the dark about the required behavior on systems that don't support
it. Could this be clarified in the help file?
thanks,
Tony Plate
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