List and Crawl SFTP Directory Contents

Retrieves a directory listing from an SFTP server. If .recursive = TRUE, it will perform a depth-first crawl of all subdirectories found, implementing a path-tracking algorithm to detect and skip circular symbolic links, preventing infinite recursion and stack overflow errors.

Usage

sftp_list(
  sftp_conn = NULL,
  sftp_url = NULL,
  .verbose = TRUE,
  .recursive = FALSE
)

Arguments

sftp_conn

An SFTPConn object containing connection details and authentication. Created by sftp_connect.

sftp_url

A SFTP URL of which the contents will be listed. If NULL, the base URL in SFTPConn will be used: contents of the SFTP home folder will be listed.

.verbose

Logical. Defaults to TRUE. Prints helpful messages.

.recursive

Logical. Defaults to FALSE. If TRUE, will recursively perform the SFTP operation:

• sftp_delete(): deletes the directory and everything within.

• sftp_list(): lists all the directories and files.

• sftp_mkdir(): creates all the missing parent directories.

• sftp_rename(): see sftp_mkdir().

Value

A data.frame containing remote file/directory metadata:

• permission: Unix-style permission string (e.g., "drwxr-xr-x").

• nlink: Number of hard links.

• user: Owner username.

• group: Owner group.

• size: File size in bytes.

• month, day, time_year: Timestamp components.

• name: File or directory name.

• type: Categorization as "dir" or "file".

• url: The source URL for that specific object.

Examples

# \donttest{
if (interactive() || Sys.getenv("R_SFTP_TEST_SERVER") == "true") {
  # Create a new SFTP connection
  sftp_conn <- sftp_connect(
    hostname = "127.0.0.1",
    port     = "2222",
    user     = "tester",
    password = "password123"
  )

  # List recursively
  sftp_list(sftp_conn, .recursive = TRUE)
}
# }