R help - Jun 2014 - .Rprofile: "contains invalid line(s)"

At some point in the recent past, my local .Rprofile has ceased to be
executed on startup. I've upgraded R several times in the last few months,
and
am unsure which version caused this problem. Currently I'm running version
3.1.0 (2014-04-10) "Spring Dance" on 64-bit Ubuntu.

    My symptoms and fix attempts:

    1) Changes I make to .Rprofile are no longer automatically recognized by R
on startup.

    2) After some Googling, I was led to believe that I need to set the
environment variable R_ENVIRON to "/home/stephen/.Rprofile." But after
doing
so, when I start R, I get an error message: "File /home/stephen/.Rprofile
contains invalid line(s)". Then it lists the contents of .Rprofile, which
are
now simply:

.First <- function() { 
    joe <<- function(x) x*2
}

    This file is perfectly valid, however, which I know because when I
explicitly source() it, it loads .First just fine, and if I run
".First()", I
can then successfully run "joe(3)".

    Why does R say this .Rprofile is invalid on startup? Is setting R_ENVIRON,
as described, the correct procedure? And why did this suddenly become
necessary?

- Stephen Davies, Ph.D.
  (stephen at umw.edu)

Hi Stephan,

R_ENVIRON should not point to your .Rpofile, use R_PROFILE_USER for
that. See ?Startup for details.

Best,
Ista

On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Stephen Davies <stephen at umw.edu>
wrote:
>
>     At some point in the recent past, my local .Rprofile has ceased to be
> executed on startup. I've upgraded R several times in the last few
months, and
> am unsure which version caused this problem. Currently I'm running
version
> 3.1.0 (2014-04-10) "Spring Dance" on 64-bit Ubuntu.
>
>     My symptoms and fix attempts:
>
>     1) Changes I make to .Rprofile are no longer automatically recognized
by R
> on startup.
>
>     2) After some Googling, I was led to believe that I need to set the
> environment variable R_ENVIRON to "/home/stephen/.Rprofile." But
after doing
> so, when I start R, I get an error message: "File
/home/stephen/.Rprofile
> contains invalid line(s)". Then it lists the contents of .Rprofile,
which are
> now simply:
>
> .First <- function() {
>     joe <<- function(x) x*2
> }
>
>     This file is perfectly valid, however, which I know because when I
> explicitly source() it, it loads .First just fine, and if I run
".First()", I
> can then successfully run "joe(3)".
>
>     Why does R say this .Rprofile is invalid on startup? Is setting
R_ENVIRON,
> as described, the correct procedure? And why did this suddenly become
> necessary?
>
> - Stephen Davies, Ph.D.
>   (stephen at umw.edu)
>
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