R: how not to use savehistory() and source()

Admitting to stupidity is part of the learning process. So in the interests of public education, here’s something stupid that I did today.

You’re working in the R console. Happy with your exploratory code, you decide to save it to a file.

savehistory(file = "myCode.R")

Then, you type something else, for example:

ls()
# more lines here

And then, decide that you should save again:

savehistory(file = "myCode.R")

You quit the console. Returning to it later, you recall that you saved your code and so can simply run source() to get back to the same point:

source("myCode.R")

Unfortunately, you forget that the sourced file now contains the savehistory() command. Result: since your new history contains only the single line source() command, then that is what gets saved back to the file, replacing all of your lovely code.

Possible solutions include:

• Remember to edit the saved file, removing or commenting out any savehistory() lines
• Generate a file name for savehistory() based on a timestamp so as not to overwrite each time
• Suggested by Scott: include a prompt in the code before savehistory()