Chiming in late on this thread...
> > | Are there any packages which
> > | would break if a call to 'tempdir' automatically recreated this
> > | directory? (Or would it be too much of a performance hit to have
> > | 'tempdir' check and even just issue a warning when the directory is
> > | found not to exist?)
>
> > | Should we have a timer which periodically updates
> > | the modification time of tempdir()? What do other long-running
> > | programs do (e.g. screen, emacs)?
>
> Valid questions, in my view. Before answering, let's try to see
> how hard it would be to make the tempdir() function in R more versatile.
Might this combination serve the purpose:
* R session keeps an open handle on the tempdir it creates,
* whatever tempdir harvesting cron job the user has be made sensitive
enough not to delete open files (including open directories)
>
> As I've found it is not at all hard to add an option which
> checks the existence and if the directory is no longer "valid",
> tries to recreate it (and if it fails doing that it calls the
> famous R_Suicide(), as it does when R starts up and tempdir()
> cannot be initialized correctly).
>
> The proposed entry in NEWS is
>
> • tempdir(check=TRUE) recreates the tmpdir() if it is no longer valid.
>
> and of course the default would be status quo, i.e., check = FALSE,
> and once this is in R-devel, we (those who install R-devel) can
> experiment with it.
>
> Martin
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