R Programming/Manage your workspace

This page explains how to manage your workspace.

Basic functions

• ls() lists the objects in your workspace.
• list.files() lists the files located in the folder's workspace
• rm() removes objects from your workspace; rm(list = ls()) removes them all.

rm(list=ls()) # remove all the objects in the workspace

Each object can be saved to the disk using the save() function. They can then be loaded into memory using load().

load("file.Rda")
...
# assume you want to save an object called 'df'
save(df, file = "file.Rda")

• save.image() saves your workspace.

Informations about the session

• sessionInfo() gives information about your session, i.e., loaded packages, R version, etc.
• R.version provides information about the R version.

Memory usage

Note: According to R version 3.5.1 on Linux and Mac, memory.size() and memory.limit() are Windows-specific.

memory.size() gives the total amount of memory currently used by R.

> memory.size()
[1] 10.18

memory.limit() without any argument gives the limit of memory used by R. This can also be used to increase the limit. The maximum amount is limited by the memory of the computer.

> memory.limit()
[1] 1535
>  memory.limit(size=2000) # 2000 stands for 2000 MB
[1] 2000

object.size() returns the size of an R object. You can print the results and choose the unit (byte,kilobytes,megabytes,etc).

> a <- rnorm(10^7)
> object.size(a)
80000024 bytes
> print(object.size(a),units="b")
80000024 bytes
> print(object.size(a),units="Kb")
78125 Kb
> print(object.size(a),units="Mb")
76.3 Mb
> print(object.size(a),units="Gb")
0.1 Gb
> print(object.size(a),units="auto")
76.3 Mb

memory.profile() returns more details.

> memory.profile()
       NULL      symbol    pairlist     closure environment     promise 
          1        4959       61794        1684         255        3808 
   language     special     builtin        char     logical     integer 
      14253          46         687        5577        2889        4060 
     double     complex   character         ...         any        list 
        523           1       11503           0           0        1024 
 expression    bytecode externalptr     weakref         raw          S4 
          1           0         497         117         118         642

• gc() initiates the garbage collector which causes R to free memory from objects no longer used.

> gc()
           used (Mb) gc trigger  (Mb) max used (Mb)
Ncells  1095165 58.5    1770749  94.6  1770749 94.6
Vcells 12060564 92.1   17769683 135.6 12062095 92.1

External links

• Dumping functions from the global environment into an R script file