Renaming folders with extensions fails.

[xgirouxb]

Some types of folders have extensions, such as geodatabases (.gdb). Some {fs} functions, such as is_dir() even recognizes these are folders. However, some other functions seem to trip up... When trying to rename a geodatabase folder, file_move() seems to assume that the path argument is a file and that new_path is a folder where we want to place it. This routine fails with fs::file_move() but work fine with base::file_rename().

library(fs)

# Create a geodatabase folder
dir_create("My_Geodatabase.gdb")

# Sanity check
is_dir("My_Geodatabase.gdb")
#> My_Geodatabase.gdb 
#>               TRUE

# Attempt to rename it using {fs}
file_move(
  path = "My_Geodatabase.gdb",
  new_path = "my_geodatabase.gdb"
)
#> Error: [EINVAL] Failed to move 'My_Geodatabase.gdb' to 'my_geodatabase.gdb/My_Geodatabase.gdb': invalid argument

# Attempt to rename it using {base}
file.rename(
  from = "My_Geodatabase.gdb",
  to = "my_geodatabase.gdb"
)
#> [1] TRUE

^{Created on 2025-07-24 with reprex v2.1.1}

Session info

sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.5.0 (2025-04-11 ucrt)
#> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
#> Running under: Windows 11 x64 (build 22631)
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#>   LAPACK version 3.12.1
#> 
#> locale:
#> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_Canada.utf8  LC_CTYPE=English_Canada.utf8   
#> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_Canada.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C                   
#> [5] LC_TIME=English_Canada.utf8    
#> 
#> time zone: America/Toronto
#> tzcode source: internal
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
#> 
#> other attached packages:
#> [1] fs_1.6.6
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] digest_0.6.37     fastmap_1.2.0     xfun_0.52         magrittr_2.0.3   
#>  [5] glue_1.8.0        tibble_3.3.0      knitr_1.50        pkgconfig_2.0.3  
#>  [9] htmltools_0.5.8.1 rmarkdown_2.29    lifecycle_1.0.4   cli_3.6.5        
#> [13] vctrs_0.6.5       reprex_2.1.1      withr_3.0.2       compiler_4.5.0   
#> [17] rstudioapi_0.17.1 tools_4.5.0       pillar_1.10.2     evaluate_1.0.3   
#> [21] yaml_2.3.10       rlang_1.1.6

[gaborcsardi]

fs does not treat extensions specially, so I would be surprised if this had anything to do with extensions.

Rather, it probably fails because you are on a case insensitive file system, and path and new_path are in fact the same file.

[xgirouxb]

Thank you for the prompt reply (and of course for the great package!) Yes you are correct, I'm on Windows. This is my first time facing this error so I assumed that it was trying to place a file in a folder based on this part of the error message: 'my_geodatabase.gdb/My_Geodatabase.gdb. Apologies for the confusion, I thought fs was agnostic to file systems so I didn't think case insensitivity would be the issue. What are the options in this case to get the same behaviour as file.rename() cross-plateform? Thanks for your help.

[xgirouxb]

Perhaps just renaming it to temp_name.gdb as an intermediate step?