file.info {base}R Documentation

Extract File Information

Description

Utility function to extract information about files on the user's file systems.

Usage

file.info(...)

Arguments

... character vectors containing file names.

Details

What is meant by “file access” and hence the last access time is system-dependent.

On most systems symbolic links are followed, so information is given about the file to which the link points rather than about the link.

Value

A data frame with row names the file names and columns

size double: File size in bytes.
isdir logical: Is the file a directory?
mode integer of class "octmode". The file permissions, printed in octal, for example 644.
mtime, ctime, atime integer of class "POSIXct": file modification, creation and last access times.
uid integer: the user ID of the file's owner.
gid integer: the group ID of the file's group.
uname character: uid interpreted as a user name.
grname character: gid interpreted as a group name.

Unknown user and group names will be NA.
Entries for non-existent or non-readable files will be NA. The uid, gid, uname and grname columns may not be supplied on a non-POSIX Unix system.

Note

This function will only be operational on systems with the stat system call, but that seems very widely available.

Some (broken) systems allow files of more than 2Gb to be created but not accessed by the stat system call. Such files will show up as non-readable (and very likely not be readable by any of R's input functions).

See Also

files, file.access, list.files, and DateTimeClasses for the date formats.

Examples

ncol(finf <- file.info(dir()))# at least six
## Not run: finf # the whole list
## Those that are more than 100 days old :
finf[difftime(Sys.time(), finf[,"mtime"], units="days") > 100 , 1:4]

file.info("no-such-file-exists")

[Package base version 2.2.1 Index]