11.2 Listing Existing Files

R also offers the possibility to list all files in a directory. This is particularly helpful when writing scripts that should parse over all files in a directory. Existing files are listed with the function list.files() that outputs a character vector containing a list of files in your working director, or in any other directory provided by the optional argument path.

> file_list <- list.files()

Often you may not want a list of all files but just those that match a particular pattern. This is easily achieved using the argument pattern.

> file_list_txts <- list.files(pattern="*.txt")

11.2.1 Exercises: Listing files

See Section 18.0.27 for solutions.

1. Calculate percentage of how many files in your Downloads directory are .pdf.