R help - Sep 2009 - Running R on read-only file system, without temporary directory

Dear All,

I would like to do run R without having write permissions to any
directory on the system. It seems that I need to modify the R source
code for this, to make R start without creating a temporary directory.

So far, so good. But should I expect any more complications? Does R
really need the temporary directory that much?

Thanks,
Gabor

-- 
Gabor Csardi <Gabor.Csardi at unil.ch>     UNIL DGM

On 04/09/2009 3:42 PM, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I would like to do run R without having write permissions to any
> directory on the system. It seems that I need to modify the R source
> code for this, to make R start without creating a temporary directory.
> 
> So far, so good. But should I expect any more complications? Does R
> really need the temporary directory that much?
Many R functions create temporary files in it.  (There are around 20 
calls to tempfile() and another 20 to tempdir() in the base R sources, 
if my quick grep was right.  I've no idea how many calls there are from 
contributed packages.)  Would R work if these all failed?  I don't know, 
but I'd guess it wouldn't work very well.

Duncan Murdoch

If you are willing to do a bit of work you could look into linking R
to an embedded file system in RAM -- maybe whefs.

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:42 PM, G?bor Cs?rdi<csardi at rmki.kfki.hu>
wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I would like to do run R without having write permissions to any
> directory on the system. It seems that I need to modify the R source
> code for this, to make R start without creating a temporary directory.
>
> So far, so good. But should I expect any more complications? Does R
> really need the temporary directory that much?
>
> Thanks,
> Gabor
>
> --
> Gabor Csardi <Gabor.Csardi at unil.ch> ? ? UNIL DGM
>
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