The Ubuntu machine I use a lot (along with others) must not be cleaning /tmp as it has a fair number of Rtmp* directories in /tmp, even when there are no R sessions running on the machine. I would like to automate their removal but there is no obvious way to see if the R process that created the tempdir is still around. If there were a way to associate R tempdir's with R processes then one could make an R-specific tool to get rid of the unused tempdirs.
Bill Dunlap TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 8:09 AM, Martin Maechler <maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch > wrote: > >>>>> Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> > >>>>> on Wed, 26 Apr 2017 08:40:38 -0500 writes: > > > On 26 April 2017 at 08:29, Duncan Murdoch wrote: > > | This seems like the wrong approach. The problem occurs as soon as > the > > | tempdir() gets cleaned up: there could be information in temp > files > > | that gets lost at that point. So the solution should be to > prevent the > > | cleanup, not to continue on after it has occurred (as "check = > TRUE" > > | does). This follows the principle that it's better for the > process to > > | always die than to sometimes silently produce incorrect results. > > > That is generally true, but also "hard" as we don't have a handle on > the OS > . > > Indeed... > and that was the reason I've proposed the simple platform > agnostic tool which does not entirely solve the problem (in this sense I > agree with "wrong approach") but allows to mitigate it and (by > followup changes) to work around many use case problems. > > > | Frederick posted the way to do this in systems using systemd. We > should > > > While that was a very helpful post yet it may only apply to Arch > Linux as > > stated. My Ubuntu systems at home and work all run systemd too, but > do _not_ > > automatically remove tempfiles. > > > Yet what he suggested is quite right: we should define a proper > config file > > for this facility and then possibly also use the /run directory as > many other > > services now and (of course) also either TEMPDIR or later the code > to have > > /run be another fallback if TMP, TEMP, TMPDIR, ... are unset. > > > Distribution maintainers such as yours truly could then include this > > configuration. > > > | be putting that in place, or the equivalent on systems using other > > | tempfile cleanups. This looks to me like something that "make > install" > > | should do, or perhaps it should be done by people putting together > > | packages for specific systems. > > > Doesn't 'make install' only write to $RHOME/ and below, plus > $PREFIX/bin ? > > Also, 'make install' is optional for good reasons. > E.g., I never ever run 'make install': I typically always have many R > versions, all available in the shell and ESS (Emacs Speaks > Statistics) via symbolic links into a directory on PATH. > > Dirk mentioned (as well) that this is all very platform specific > which I do think is important. From my typical OS point of view: > Why should the user who runs R not have the right to delete the > tempdir which was created by the process that she runs and hence owns ? > > I agree it would be an improvement if we made such deletion much > harder than it is now, and yes, there may be great (almost) > cross-platform tools available to manage this much better than > we do now, e.g., via open files. > > Before we are there, I would find it useful to have a new > 'tempdir' (i.e. folder/directory for R's temporary files) to be > re-created manually or automagically in those cases it has > disappeared, and that is within easy reach via the proposed > tempdir() functionality. > > OTOH, I typically live very well by quickly killing > and restarting R (from inside ESS). > > The OP issue was to help newbies and computer-non-experts, the > latter nowadays comprising more than 90% of R users (I'd guess ~ > 98% looking at our otherwise smart students). > > These are typically "slightly" confused when they ask for help and > get a pretty severe error message: > > > ?lm > Error in file(out, "wt") : cannot open the connection > In addition: Warning message: > In file(out, "wt") : > cannot open file '/tmp/RtmpztK6f7/Rtxt36972b91938': No such file or > directory > > > Martin > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
