Set or Unset Environment Variables

Description

Sys.setenv sets environment variables (for other processes called from within R or future calls to Sys.getenv from this R process).

Sys.unsetenv removes environment variables.

Usage

Sys.setenv(...)

Sys.unsetenv(x)

Arguments

Details

Non-standard R names must be quoted in Sys.setenv: see the examples. Most platforms (and POSIX) do not allow names containing "=". Windows does, but the facilities provided by R may not handle these correctly so they should be avoided. Most platforms allow setting an environment variable to "", but Windows does not and there Sys.setenv(FOO = "") unsets FOO.

There may be system-specific limits on the maximum length of the values of individual environment variables or of names+values of all environment variables.

Recent versions of Windows have a maximum length of 32,767 characters for a environment variable; however cmd.exe has a limit of 8192 characters for a command line, hence set can only set 8188.

Value

A logical vector, with elements being true if (un)setting the corresponding variable succeeded. (For Sys.unsetenv this includes attempting to remove a non-existent variable.)

Note

On Unix-alikes, if Sys.unsetenv is not supported, it will at least try to set the value of the environment variable to "", with a warning.

See Also

Sys.getenv, Startup for ways to set environment variables for the R session.

setwd for the working directory.

Sys.setlocale to set (and get) language locale variables, and notably Sys.setLanguage to set the LANGUAGE environment variable which is used for conditionMessage translations.

The help for ‘environment variables’ lists many of the environment variables used by R.

Examples

print(Sys.setenv(R_TEST = "testit", "A+C" = 123))  # `A+C` could also be used
Sys.getenv("R_TEST")
Sys.unsetenv("R_TEST") # on Unix-alike may warn and not succeed
Sys.getenv("R_TEST", unset = NA)