[R-pkg-devel] Dealing with not so temporary files

[Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal]

Hi All:

Recently there was a proper admonishment to a developer that it is bad etiquette writing to a user's home directory,  and for temporary files use the functions tempdir() and tempfile().  I am working on a new package (presently on Github) that downloads data from a remote server,  reads the data into R,  but I would like to save that file for the user to access later if they so desire.  Saving to the "temp directory" is not a good option for that,  want to put it somewhere where the user can easily find it.  What is the proper etiquette for this?  Even if I provide an argument for the user to specify the location to save the file,  I should provide a default location.  

Any suggestions appreciated.

-Roy





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"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or NOAA."
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Roy Mendelssohn
Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
NOAA/NMFS
Environmental Research Division
Southwest Fisheries Science Center
***Note new street address***
110 McAllister Way
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Phone: (831)-420-3666
Fax: (831) 420-3980
e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn at noaa.gov www: http://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/

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