What ways are there for cleaning an R environment from objects?

Question

I know I can use ls() and rm() to see and remove objects that exist in my environment.

However, when dealing with "old" .RData file, one needs to sometimes pick an environment a part to find what to keep and what to leave out.

What I would like to do, is to have a GUI like interface to allow me to see the objects, sort them (for example, by there size), and remove the ones I don't need (for example, by a check-box interface). Since I imagine such a system is not currently implemented in R, what ways do exist? What do you use for cleaning old .RData files?

Thanks,

Tal

Answer 1

I never create .RData files. If you are practicing reproducible research (and you should be!) you should be able to source in R files to go from input data files to all outputs.

When you have operations that take a long time it makes sense to cache them. If often use a construct like:

 if (file.exists("cache.rdata")) { 
    load("cache.rdata")
 } else {
    # do stuff ...
    save(..., file = "cache.rdata")
 }

This allows you to work quickly from cached files, and when you need to recalculate from scratch you can just delete all the rdata files in your working directory.