# R: Extract File Information

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 paths.

### Details

The file paths are tilde-expanded: see `path.expand`.

What is meant by ‘file access’ and hence the last access time is system-dependent.

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.

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

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 2.6.0 Index]