R2.1.0: Bug in list.files
Uwe Ligges wrote:
Please read about regular expressions (!!!) and try to understand that ".txt" also finds "Not_a_txt_file.xls" ....
The confusion here is between regular expressions and wildcard expansion known as 'globbing'. The two things are very different, and use characters such as '*' '.' and '?' in different ways. There's added confusion when people come from a DOS background, where commands did their own thing when given '*' as parameter. The DOS command: RENAME *.FOO *.BAR did what seems obvious, renaming all the .FOO files to .BAR, but on a unix machine doing this with 'mv' can be destructive! In short (and slightly simplified), a '*' when expanded as a wildcard in a glob matches any string, whereas a '*' in a regular expression (regexp), matches the previous character 0 or more times. This is why "*.zip" is flagged as invalid now - there's no character before the "*". That should be enough clues to send you on your way. Baz