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.Rprofile, .Rfirst, and .Rdata

5 messages · Henrik Bengtsson, David Richmond, Martin Maechler +1 more

Original
David Richmond
# 
Hi all,
	After a short hiatus away from R I have found that it's changed a bit. 
I used to keep a definition of .First in .Rprofile that did a couple of 
things on startup (load a couple of libraries). Now, I've discovered 
that when I change the definition of .First in .Rprofile it doesn't 
change anything when I start up, because .First is held over in .Rdata 
from the last session. The manual states that now .Rdata is loaded 
last, as intended. My question is, how do I change what's in .First (or 
any other variable, for that matter), if .Rdata will always override my 
changes? (I'd prefer not to have to do it manually, and I'd prefer to 
have all the other data preserved, rather than just leaving out .Rdata)

Dave R.
Henrik Bengtsson
# 
What do you have in .First() that you can not have directly in the
.Rprofile script? For example:

# ~/.Rprofile
cat("Running my .Rprofile...");
library(modreg)
cat("Running my .Rprofile...done");

Henrik Bengtsson
David Richmond
#
On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 09:30 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Nothing that I can think of, but it's the principle of the thing. If i 
did have a reason to change .First, how would I do it ? More generally, 
suppose I want to ensure a variable is set to a certain value in 
.Rprofile, how can I be sure that R.data won't overwrite it? It just 
seems like loading .Rdata after .Rprofile makes it difficult to change 
things easily.

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Martin Maechler
    

    

      
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David> On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 09:30  PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:

        
>> What do you have in .First() that you can not have directly in the
    >> .Rprofile script? For example:
    >> 

    David> Nothing that I can think of, but it's the principle
    David> of the thing. If i did have a reason to change
    David> .First, how would I do it ? More generally, suppose I
    David> want to ensure a variable is set to a certain value
    David> in .Rprofile, how can I be sure that .RData won't
    David> overwrite it? It just seems like loading .RData after
    David> .Rprofile makes it difficult to change things easily.

Setting global variables and relying on their values is always `un-clean'.
In your case, I would set options(): They can't ever be overridden by
any .RData -- e.g.,
     options(myABC = 1:3, myFile = "/abc/def")
and then use  getOption("myABC")
instead of a global variable named `ABC'.

BTW: I advocate not working with .RData at all. 
     I work with *.R scripts (using ESS) and when needed, explicit  
     save(.) and load(.) for a given list of objects and with
     filenames such as "foobar.rda" instead of ".RData".

Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>	http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/
Seminar fuer Statistik, ETH-Zentrum  LEO C16	Leonhardstr. 27
ETH (Federal Inst. Technology)	8092 Zurich	SWITZERLAND
phone: x-41-1-632-3408		fax: ...-1228			<><

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Pierre Kleiber
    

    

      
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For me, it's useful to have local versions of .First in the working
directories of each project.  I put global startup stuff in .Rprofile 
and startup stuff particular to each project in the .First-s.  I've 
always thought that .First was designed for that purpose.

Pierre Kleiber             Email: pkleiber at honlab.nmfs.hawaii.edu
Fishery Biologist                     Tel: 808 983-5399/737-7544
NOAA FISHERIES - Honolulu Laboratory         Fax: 808 983-2902

        
David Richmond wrote: