list.files() find files beginning with a .

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="^\\.")