Suggested feature: Give users the ability to change directory for temporary files

[Jo-Schie]

Terra package creates temporary files when an output SpatRaster may be too large to store in memory (RAM). This can happen when no filename is provided to a function and when using functions where you cannot provide a filename.

It happens to me at times, that I run out of memory if I work on serveral rasters in a loop. This also happend with the raster package before. I wondered if it was possible to create a small function that would handle where terra writes tempfiles to. So instead of defaulting to /tmp/Rdfkwnwwd-something folder from the Rsession, the user could also provide a custom path to e.g. an external disc where temporary files would be stored.

Why not do this on the system level? I searched around and tried a lot of different options for changing the tempfolder on unix systems, bot none really seems to work satisfying and smoothly for me. AFAIK there is also no up-to-date package that would provide this functionality. There is e.g. a way described here but currently it did not work for me well together with terra.

[rhijmans]

You can do this with

terraOptions(tempdir="this/is/my/path")

[Jo-Schie]

oh! Nice, you thought of it all. Thanks for the information. I'll try that feature. Great work with terra!