R: Manipulate File Paths

basename {base} | R Documentation

## Manipulate File Paths

### Description

`basename` removes all of the path up to and including the last path separator (if any).

`dirname` returns the part of the `path` up to but excluding the last path separator, or `"."` if there is no path separator.

### Usage

    basename(path)
    dirname(path)

### Arguments

`path` | character vector, containing path names.

### Details

For `dirname` tilde expansion of the path is done.

Trailing path separators are removed before dissecting the path, and for `dirname` any trailing file separators are removed from the result.

### Value

A character vector of the same length as `path`. A zero-length input will give a zero-length output with no error.

Paths not containing any separators are taken to be in the current directory, so `dirname` returns `"."`.

If an element of `path` is `NA`, so is the result.

`""` is not a valid pathname, but is returned unchanged.

### Behaviour on Windows

On Windows this will accept either `\` or `/` as the path separator, but `dirname` will return a path using `/` (except if on a network share, when the leading `\\` will be preserved). Expect these only to be able to handle complete paths, and not for example just a network share or a drive.

UTF-8-encoded path names not valid in the current locale can be used.

### Note

These are not wrappers for the POSIX system functions of the same names: in particular they do not have the special handling of the path `"/"` and of returning `"."` for empty strings.

### See Also

`file.path`, `path.expand`.

### Examples

    basename(file.path("","p1","p2","p3", c("file1", "file2")))
    dirname(file.path("","p1","p2","p3","filename"))

[Package base version 3.1.2 Index]