I am trying to obtain the list of files matching a **full-path** pattern. So far, I have used list.files() but it did not work.

Let's assume that we have the following directory organization:

```
results
   |- A
   |  |- data-1.csv
   |  |- data-2.csv
   |
   |- B
      |- data-1.csv
      |- data-2.csv

```

Then the following command:

```
list.files(pattern='data-.*\\.csv', recursive=TRUE)

```

will return all the files matching the pattern. This works, but the problem appears when using a **full-path** pattern. For instance, if I want to obtain all the CSV files from directory *results/A*, I could do:

```
list.files(pattern='results/A/data-.*\\.csv', recursive=TRUE)

```

This does not work, though. Somehow, it seems like R is not able to use a full-path pattern as a regular expression. In this case, the solution could be to just use *results/A* as the base path. But in more complex problems, that cannot be done. For instance, at some point we may want to match the subdirectories containing only characters:

```
list.files(pattern='results/[A-Z]+/data-.*\\.csv', recursive=TRUE)

```

Is it possible to do this in R?

**UPDATE:** After using ad hoc solutions for a while, I decided to stop typing the same again and again. So, I created a [library](https://github.com/betabandido/exptools) for simplifying this task.