Changing temporary directory in R [duplicate]

Answer 1

How exactly are you setting the temporary directory? The R documentation in ?tempdir says this:

By default, tmpdir will be the directory given by tempdir(). This will be a subdirectory of the per-session temporary directory found by the following rule when the R session is started. 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.

Presumedly, if you have the TMPDIR environment variable set, R (and hence RStudio) should just do the right thing. Note that you'll have to set before R / RStudio is launched; odds are you can accomplish this by setting it within ~/.Renviron or ~/.Rprofile.

See also: Change temporary directory

Answer 2

In windows, for me what worked is creating a file named Renviron.site and filling it with

TMPDIR=E:/rtemp 
TMP=E:/rtemp 
TEMP=E:/rtemp

Where E:/rtemp was the path to the directory where I wanted the temporary files. So you create a new text file, fill it with the above, and change its name (and extension) to Renviron.site.

Put it inside the R installation directory, in the directory etc (e.g. C:\Program Files\R\R-3.3.2\etc) and restart RStudio or R.