Path to user cache directory

This functions uses R_USER_CACHE_DIR if set. Otherwise, they follow platform conventions. Typical user cache directories are:

• Mac OS X: ~/Library/Caches/<AppName>

• Linux: ~/.cache/<AppName>

• Win XP: C:\\Documents and Settings\\<username>\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\<AppAuthor>\\<AppName>\\Cache

• Vista: C:\\Users\\<username>\\AppData\\Local\\<AppAuthor>\\<AppName>\\Cache

Usage

user_cache_dir(
  appname = NULL,
  appauthor = appname,
  version = NULL,
  opinion = TRUE,
  expand = TRUE,
  os = NULL
)

Arguments

appname

is the name of application. If NULL, just the system directory is returned.

appauthor

(only required and used on Windows) is the name of the appauthor or distributing body for this application. Typically it is the owning company name. This falls back to appname.

version

is an optional version path element to append to the path. You might want to use this if you want multiple versions of your app to be able to run independently. If used, this would typically be "<major>.<minor>". Only applied when appname is not NULL.

opinion

(logical) Use FALSE to disable the appending of Cache on Windows. See discussion below.

expand

If TRUE (the default) will expand the R_LIBS specifiers with their equivalents. See R_LIBS() for list of all possibly specifiers.

os

Operating system whose conventions are used to construct the requested directory. Possible values are "win", "mac", "unix". If NULL (the default) then the current OS will be used.

Opinion

On Windows the only suggestion in the MSDN docs is that local settings go in the CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA directory. This is identical to the non-roaming app data dir (i.e. user_data_dir()). But apps typically put cache data somewhere under this directory so user_cache_dir() appends Cache to the CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA value, unless opinion = FALSE.

See also

tempdir() for a non-persistent temporary directory.

Examples

user_cache_dir("rappdirs")
#> [1] "~/.cache/rappdirs"