Combining or merging workspaces in R and general workspace management

Question

I often find myself transferring workspaces to different scratch drives etc when one computing system is down/busy, or, I want to run two long-winded packages simultaneously to save time and loading the same workspace twice in different places. Because of this, I'd really love a way to see the different objects between workspaces and a way to combine them, adding only the new, changed or updated workspace objects to a similar workspace. This would be extremely useful for me. So far I am relying on manual note-taking and getting befuddled with my scribbles two weeks down the line. I really just want to learn so good working practices and habits that make this sort of this easier. Generally I would really like to learn more about workspace management and how experienced users keep workspaces for long, ongoing projects comprehensive and tidy. I often use Rstudio but working remotely or using our HPC system it can be a bit laggy and clunky so I tend to use command line and interactive ses…

Accepted Answer

I think one needs to build ones own function here doing the following:

loading the workspaces one after one, using:

```
load()
```

renaming each element of the workspace to prevent overriding when loading another workspace or putting it into a list

checking the timestamp of the workspaces with:

```
file.info()
```

and keeping only the newest objects, which are then to be saved in some up-to-date workspace

Example:

```
for(i in 1:10){
    dummy <- rnorm(1)
    Sys.sleep(1.3)
    save(dummy,file=paste("test",i,".Rdata",sep=""))
}

DUMMY <- list()
timestamps <- NULL

for(i in 1:10){
    filename <- paste("test",i,".Rdata",sep="")
    load(filename)
    DUMMY[[i]] <- dummy
    timestamps[i] <- file.info(filename)$mtime
}

uptodate <- unlist(timestamps)==max(unlist(timestamps))
dummy <- unlist(DUMMY[uptodate])
save(dummy,file="uptodate.Rdata")
```

Combining or merging workspaces in R and general workspace management

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