Initialization at Start of an R Session

Description

In R, the startup mechanism is as follows. R first searches for the site-wide startup profile unless the command line option --no-site-file was given. The name of this file is taken from the value of the ‘R\_PROFILE’ (RPROFILE as used by older versions is now deprecated) environment variable. If that variable is unset, the default is ‘\$R\_HOME/etc/Rprofile’.

Then, unless --no-init-file was given, R searches for a file called ‘.Rprofile’ in the current directory or in the user's home directory (in that order) and sources it.

It also loads a saved image from ‘.RData’ in case there is one (unless --no-restore was specified).

Finally, if a function .First exists, it is executed as .First().

The functions .First and .Last can be defined in the appropriate startup profiles or reside in ‘.RData’.

Usage

.First <- function() { ...... }

.Rprofile <startup file>

See Also

.Last for final actions before termination.