[R] tempdir() does not respect TMPDIR

[Henrik Bengtsson]

It is too late to set TMPDIR in .Renviron.  It is one of the
environment variables that has to be set prior to launching R.  From
help("tempfile", package = "base"):

The environment variables TMPDIR, TMP and TEMP are checked in turn and
the first found which points to a writable directory is used: if none
succeeds ‘/tmp’ is used. The path should not contain spaces. **Note
that setting any of these environment variables in the R session has
no effect on tempdir(): the per-session temporary directory is created
before the interpreter is started.**

/Henrik

On Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 6:40 AM Jinsong Zhao <jszhao using yeah.net> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> When I started R by double clicking on Rgui icon (I am on Windows), the
> tempdir() returned the tmpdir in the directory I set in .Renviron. If I
> started R by double clicking on a *.RData file, the tempdir() return the
> tmpdir in the directory setting by Windows system. I don't know whether
> it's designed.
>
>  > sessionInfo()
> R version 4.0.2 (2020-06-22)
> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
> Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 18363)
> ...
>
> Best,
> Jinsong
>
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