Clearing all user-defined objects in R workspace

Question

I'm working with Rserve via Ruby bindings. It's pretty trivial to establish a connection to Rserve, and I assume its a good idea to persist that connection globally to avoid the overhead of tearing it down and re-building it as needed (I'm not operating in a multi-threaded environment).

Since the objects defined will stick around, and potentially class with later operations, I want to clear them out. I've seen:

myvar = 1
rm(myvar)

However, I would rather re-initialize everything, to avoid having to manually keep track of whats defined. Is this possible? Is there a significant overhead associated with it if so?

Answer 1

it is a bit dangerous but: rm(list=ls()) really, don't do this.

Answer 2

If you are working with a dataset let say named data_new, you can use the following comment to remove all information about data_new from your workspace:

rm(data = data_new)