[R] Persistent storage between package invocations

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011, Hadley Wickham wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Does anyone have any advice or experience storing package settings
> between R runs?  Can I rely on the user's home directory (e.g.
> tools::file_path_as_absolute("~")) to be available and writeable
> across platforms?

No.  First, please use path.expand("~") for this, and it does not 
necessarily mean the home directory (and in principle it might not 
expand at all).  In practice I think it will always be *a* home 
directory, but on Windows there may be more than one (and watch out 
for local/roaming profile differences).

Second, it need not be writeable, and so many package authors write 
rubbish in my home directory that I usually arrange it not be 
writeable to R test processes.

If you want something writeable across processes, use 
dirname(tempdir()) .

>
> Hadley
>
> -- 
> Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
> Department of Statistics / Rice University
> http://had.co.nz/
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595