file.info                package: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")

