[R] .Rhistory in R.app

[Maria Gouskova]

Dear R users,

I am having a minor but annoying issue with R.app. It doesn't retain
the history information from the previous sessions. By "history," I
mean a record of commands/functions entered into R rather than the
list of objects--that is properly recorded in the .Rdata file as well
as in a workspace file I save separately.

System details:

R version 2.9.0
R.app GUI 1.28
Mac OS 10.6.2 (MacBook, Intel 2.4 GHz, 4 Gb RAM)

Things I've done:

R>Preferences>Startup>History: Read history file on startup is
checked; R history file directory is specified with a path to my
preferred directory (~/Documents/...). I've tried it with the default
setting, too--it makes no difference.

I've checked the permissions on the .Rhistory file. The default
.Rhistory file created by R has the permissions set at -rw-r--r--.

I've moved the .Rhistory file to a different location (Desktop), so
that R would create a new one. Makes no difference--command history is
still empty at startup.

R has kept track of history on my system in the past--the file I moved
to the desktop has a record of my work from about a year ago. (By the
way, that file's permissions are -rwx-----.) Judging by what is in the
old .Rhistory file, the problem started around the time of my upgrade
from 2.7.x to 2.8. I am reluctant to upgrade to R 2.10 in the middle
of a project, because every R upgrade I've done in the past has broken
something, and I've had nothing but grief with my open source apps
after upgrading to Snow Leopard. So if there is some kind of a fix
that doesn't involve upgrading R, I'd love to hear about it.

Maria Gouskova