[R] change location of temporary files

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 1:55 PM, William Dunlap via R-help
<r-help at r-project.org> wrote:
> Does setting the environment variable TMPDIR, before starting R,
> to a directory on a bigger file system help?  On Linux I get
>
>   % mkdir /tmp/RTMP-BILL
>   % env TMPDIR=/tmp/RTMP-BILL R --quiet --vanilla
>   > tempdir()
>   [1] "/tmp/RTMP-BILL/Rtmppgowz4"
>   > tempfile()
>   [1] "/tmp/RTMP-BILL/Rtmppgowz4/file7ce36ec5cb1e"
>
> I don't know if there is an R-specific environment variable or startup
> flag for this.

Yes, TMPDIR needs to be set *prior* to launching R in order for R to
acknowledge it.  Although most environment variables can be set in
platform-independent Renviron files which are processed early during
the R startup, TMPDIR is one of the exception - it is simply too late
to set it there because R =needs it very very early on.  So, it needs
to be set as in Bill's example above, or similarly:

export TMPDIR=/tmp/RTMP-BILL

/Henrik

>
>
>
> Bill Dunlap
> TIBCO Software
> wdunlap tibco.com
>
> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 10:52 AM, Kumar Mainali <kpmainali at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I would like to change where R stores the temporary files to my external
>> hard drive in my iMac. This is important because the temporary files R
>> creates are huge and I do not have enough available space in my internal
>> HD. Again, this is for macOS.
>>
>> This change has to be temporary. Later I need to use the usual location for
>> temp files in the internal HD.
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Kumar Mainali
>>
>> --
>> Postdoctoral Associate
>> Department of Biology
>> University of Maryland, College Park
>> ᐧ
>>
>>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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>
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>
> ______________________________________________
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