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(..., extra_cols = TRUE)

file.mode(...)
file.mtime(...)
file.size(...)

Arguments

...	character vectors containing file paths. Tilde-expansion is done: see path.expand.
extra_cols	Logical: return all cols rather than just the first six.

Details

What constitutes a ‘file’ is OS-dependent but includes directories. (However, directory names must not include a trailing backslash or slash on Windows.) See also the section in the help for file.exists on case-insensitive file systems.

The file ‘mode’ follows POSIX conventions, giving three octal digits summarizing the permissions for the file owner, the owner's group and for anyone respectively. Each digit is the logical or of read (4), write (2) and execute/search (1) permissions.

See files for how file paths with marked encodings are interpreted.

File modes are probably only useful on NTFS file systems, and it seems all three digits refer to the file's owner. The execute/search bits are set for directories, and for files based on their extensions (e.g., ‘.exe’, ‘.com’, ‘.cmd’ and ‘.bat’ files). file.access will give a more reliable view of read/write access availability to the R process.

UTF-8-encoded file names not valid in the current locale can be used.

Junction points and symbolic links are followed, so information is given about the file/directory to which the link points rather than about the link.

Value

For file.info, 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	object of class "POSIXct": file modification, ‘last status change’ and last access times.

exe	character: what sort of executable is this? Possible values are "no", "msdos", "win16", "win32", "win64" and "unknown". Note that a file (e.g., a script file) can be executable according to the mode bits but not executable in this sense.

If extra_cols is false, only the first six columns are returned: as these can all be found from a single C system call this can be faster. (However, properly configured systems will use a ‘name service cache daemon’ to speed up the name lookups.)

Entries for non-existent or non-readable files will be NA.

What is meant by the three file times depends on the OS and file system. On Windows native file systems ctime is the file creation time (something which is not recorded on most Unix-alike file systems). What is meant by ‘file access’ and hence the ‘last access time’ is system-dependent.

The resolution of the file times depends on both the OS and the type of the file system. Modern file systems typically record times to an accuracy of a microsecond or better: notable exceptions are HFS+ on macOS (recorded in seconds) and modification time on older FAT systems (recorded in increments of 2 seconds). Note that "POSIXct" times are by default printed in whole seconds: to change that see strftime.

file.mode, file.mtime and file.size are convenience wrappers returning just one of the columns.

See Also

Sys.readlink to find out about symbolic links, files, file.access, list.files, and DateTimeClasses for the date formats.

Sys.chmod to change permissions.

Examples

ncol(finf <- file.info(dir()))  # at least six
finf # the whole list
## Those that are more than 100 days old :
finf <- file.info(dir(), extra_cols = FALSE)
finf[difftime(Sys.time(), finf[,"mtime"], units = "days") > 100 , 1:4]

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

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