How to obtain a list of directories within a directory, like list.files(), but instead “list.dirs()”

Update: A list.dirs function was added to the base package in revision 54353, which was included in the R-2.13.0 release in April, 2011.

list.dirs(path = ".", full.names = TRUE, recursive = TRUE)

So my function below was only useful for a few months. 🙂

I couldn’t find a base R function to do this, but it would be pretty easy to write your own using:

dir()[file.info(dir())$isdir]

Update: here’s a function (now corrected for Timothy Jones’ comment):

list.dirs <- function(path=".", pattern=NULL, all.dirs=FALSE,
  full.names=FALSE, ignore.case=FALSE) {
  # use full.names=TRUE to pass to file.info
  all <- list.files(path, pattern, all.dirs,
           full.names=TRUE, recursive=FALSE, ignore.case)
  dirs <- all[file.info(all)$isdir]
  # determine whether to return full names or just dir names
  if(isTRUE(full.names))
    return(dirs)
  else
    return(basename(dirs))
}