Recent versions of Windows will remove empty directories from areas that Windows considers places for temporary files. It does not seem to matter how old they are; empty directories are found and removred c. once a day. I haven't seen any documentation on this feature but I think you can turn if off by disabling "Storage Sense" in Settings>System>Storage.
This means that R's tempdir() can easily disappear unless you put a file in it. I think an empty file will do the trick. Perhaps R could do this when it makes a new tempdir(). (When the file gets old, 30 days?, it will be removed and then the empty directory holding it will be removed, but that is better than the current situation.) On a related note, R-3.5 has a new argument to tempdir: check=FALSE. If 'check' is TRUE then tempdir() will make a new directory, with a new name, in which to hold temporary files. If it first tried to make a new directory with the name of the previous tempdir() then things like fix(), which cache the name of a file in tempdir(), will continue to work. Is the plan to make check=TRUE the default in tempdir(), or perhaps have tempfile() call tempdir(check=TRUE)? Then we would not have problems like > file.rename(tempdir(), paste0(tempdir(), "~")) # mimic Windows cleaner [1] TRUE > file.create(tempfile()) [1] FALSE Warning message: In file.create(tempfile()) : cannot create file '/tmp/RtmpHKpWnV/file67f416dcb511', reason 'No such file or directory' Bill Dunlap TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel