[R] list.files() find files beginning with a .

[Uwe Ligges]

On 08.07.2012 14:47, syrvn wrote:
> Hello,
>
> when I use list.files with recursive = TRUE and all.files = TRUE, R returns
> a list of strings/paths.
>>From all those strings I want to keep only the ones starting with a .
> I tried using grep to achieve that. However, the problem is that because of
> the recursive list.files parameter,
> for some files beginning with a . there is a path attached. I think it is
> not as simple as it looks because all files
> end with . something. .xlsx or .txt or .r...
> 		
> files <- list.files("~", recursive = TRUE, all.files = TRUE)
> files
> /XXX/ZZZ/.R_history
> /XXX/ZZZ/AAA/Script.r
> /XXX/ZZZ/BBB/test.xlsx
> /XXX/ZZZ/CCC/.xyz
>
> files <- files[grep("^.*$", files)]
>
> I want grep to return only the following to lines:
>
> /XXX/ZZZ/.R_history
> /XXX/ZZZ/CCC/.xyz


You do not need grep, let list.files do all the stuff for you:

list.files("~", recursive = TRUE, all.files = TRUE, pattern="^\\.")

Best,
Uwe Ligges


> Any ideas on how to solve that issue?
>
> Cheers
> syrvn
>
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