r - How to sort files list by date?

Question

I'm using list.files(path, pattern, full.names = TRUE) to get a list of files in a specific directory.

The files are, by default, sorted alphabetically. Is there any way in R to keep them sorted by date?

Answer 1

You can use the file.info function to obtain details on your files. Once you have those details, you can sort the files accordingly. For example,

details = file.info(list.files(pattern="*.csv"))

gives a data frame containing, inter alia, modification and creation times. You can sort that data frame however you want. Here I sort according to modification time, mtime:

details = details[with(details, order(as.POSIXct(mtime))), ]
files = rownames(details)