Copy folder recursive in R

Question

Am I missing something in the functions?
I want to copy a folder with some files and another subfolder from one location to another. I tried to use file.copy(from, to, recursive=TRUE) but it complains with an error message:

In file.copy("my_folder", "new_folder", :
'recursive' will be ignored as 'to' is not a single existing directory

The result is a file called new_folder with no content.

Is there a way to copy the complete folder structure with R?

Answer 1

Ok, I just figured out what the error means... :-) I have to create the new directory in advance and now I can copy everything...

dir.create('new_folder')
file.copy("my_folder", "new_folder", recursive=TRUE)

This works as expected.

Answer 2

I think R.utils::copyDirectory(oldDir, newDir) is the solution to what you're asking. It doesn't require creating newDir first, either.

Answer 3

as @matifou says in the comments, the accepted answer by the questioneer himself is a bit confusing, because you end up with the copied folder inside a folder with the same name as the copied folder... to avoid this, do this instead:

case: you want to move folder_X to folder_Z.

# create empty folder Z inside folder X
dir.create('(...)/folder_X/folder_Z')
# copy the folder
file.copy('(...)/path_to_folder_Z', '(...)/folder_X')

so the second argument to file.copy shold be just folder_X, and not the newly created folder_Z inside folder_X.

Because if you do that, the folder structure will be like this, which is probably not what you want:

(...)/folder_X/folder_Z/folder_Z

(Maybe this will save somebody the 10 minutes or so it took me to figure out)