From tplate at acm.org  Wed Nov 11 05:16:39 2009
From: tplate at acm.org (Tony Plate)
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:16:39 -0700
Subject: [Rd] typo in docs for unlink()
In-Reply-To: <4AFA350D.7060303@acm.org>
References: <4AFA350D.7060303@acm.org>
Message-ID: <4AFA3AA7.8080104@acm.org>

PS, I should have said that I'm reading the docs for unlink in R-2.10.0 
on a Linux system.  The docs that appear in a Windows installation of R 
are different (the Windows docs do not mention that not all systems 
support recursive=TRUE).

Here's a plea for docs to be uniform across all systems!  Trying to 
write R code that works on all systems is much harder when the docs are 
different across systems, and you might only see system specific notes 
on a different system than the one you're working on.

-- Tony Plate

Tony Plate wrote:
> The VALUE section in the help for 'unlink' says:
>
> |  0| for success, |1| for failure. Not deleting a non-existent file 
> is not a failure, nor is being unable to delete a directory if 
> |recursive = FALSE|. However, missing values in |x| result are 
> regarded as failures.
>
> The last phrase doesn't make sense to me.  Should it be either 
> "missing values in x are regarded as failures" or "missing values in x 
> result in failure" ?
>
> Also, after reading the docs, I'm still unable to work out if unlink() 
> will return 1 when the user tries to recursively delete a directory on 
> systems that don't support recursive=T.
>
> The DETAILS section says "recursive=TRUE is not supported on all 
> platforms, and may be ignored, with a warning", which could be 
> interpreted as implying no special action when recursive=TRUE is not 
> implemented (other than a warning()), and the VALUE section doesn't 
> say what the return value will be under such conditions.
>
> I've skimmed the various *_unlink functions in src/main/platform.c, 
> and it looks like they all implement recursive=TRUE, so I'm still in 
> the dark about the required behavior on systems that don't support 
> it.  Could this be clarified in the help file?
>
> thanks,
>
> Tony Plate
>
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[Rd] typo in docs for unlink()
Tony Plate