achubaty / tmpdir

Set the Location of the R Session's Temporary Directory

tmpdir

Set the location of the R session's temporary directory

This can be useful under a few circumstances:

1. when performing large file operations using tempdir() or tempfile(), which may fill up the system's temporary storage (e.g., /tmp), which could hang the system;
2. immediately after forking the R process, to ensure multiple processes do not conflict.

NOTE: use at the start of a new R session (or immediately after forking) to switch the temporary directory location used for the session (or forked process).

Installation

You can install the development version of tmpdir like so:

remotes::install_github("achubaty/tmpdir")

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:

library(tmpdir)

tempdir() ## current temp dir
myScratchDir <- file.path(basename(tempdir(), "scratch")) ## new temp dir to use
setTmpDir(myScratchDir, rmOldTempDir = TRUE)
unlink(myScratchDir, recur sive = TRUE)