[Rd] How is the environment variable "R_USER" defined?

[Jiefei Wang]

Thanks for all your help!! It actually has nothing to do with the
environment variables. The issue is caused by the backup feature in
Onedrive as Bill suggested. I do not know what magic trick Onedrive
uses here but it misadvices R to use its directory, not my local
Document directory. The answer might be from Windows FAQ question 2.14
like Duncan posted

After those two user-controllable settings, R tries to find
system-defined home directories. It first tries to use the Windows
"personal" directory

This is confusing. First, this FAQ is not about how "R_USER" is
defined. Instead, it talks about how we find the home directory from
"R_USER". Second, it still did not answer what is "the Windows
personal directory". I think this is where the issue is. My Document
still has the path "C:\Users\wangj\Documents", but there is a backup
path in "C:\Users\wangj\OneDrive\Documents". Unfortunately, R believes
the latter one is the "personal directory". I hope this can be
clarified a little bit to avoid confusion.

Best,
Jiefei

On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 12:32 PM Bill Dunlap <williamwdunlap using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is your C:\Users\yourname\Documents linked to OneDrive (either by your choice or by some administrator setting a group policy)?  If so, ou could unlink it using OneDrive's settings dialog.   Or you could set R_USER to avoid using ...\Documents.
>
> -Bill
>
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 8:47 AM Jiefei Wang <szwjf08 using gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, I have a new win system and try to install R as usual. Somehow,
>> the environment variable "R_LIBS_USER" is incorrectly pointed to a
>> Onedrive folder. Since "R_LIBS_USER" depends on "R_USER", the root
>> problem then becomes why "R_USER" is the path to the Onedrive. I did
>> an exhausting search in the R directory and the only related message I
>> can find is from EnvVar.html, which states
>>
>> R_USER: The user's ‘home’ directory. Set by R. (HOME will be set to
>> the same value if not already set.)
>>
>> I guess that's another way to say "no document is available yet". I
>> also took a look at my system environment variables but there are only
>> two variables related to Onedrive, they are
>>
>> OneDrive=C:\Users\wangj\OneDrive
>>
>> OneDriveConsumer=C:\Users\wangj\OneDrive
>>
>> so everything looks pretty normal, I know I can correct this issue by
>> manually adding Renviron but I just wonder where this default behavior
>> comes from...
>>
>> Best,
>> Jiefei
>>
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