Disable saving history

Question

Is it possible to disable saving command history / session in R by default ? I really hate those .RData and .RHistory files !!

Answer 1

If you are using an R gui, an alternative and quite nice approach, due to Brian Ripley, (see here), is to put the following lines in your 'R_HOME/etc/Rprofile.site' file:

q <- function (save = "no", status = 0, runLast = TRUE)
.Internal(quit(save, status, runLast))

One note of caution: this won't work when you invoke R from the command-line. In that case, just use the --no-save argument described in @mdsumner answer.

To learn more about 'Rprofile.site', and '.Rprofile' (an optional per-directory config file), see the always useful ?Startup help file.