Installing R Packages Error in readRDS(file) : error reading from connection

Question

Whenever I try to install any package in R on Ubuntu 14.04, I\'m getting the following error:

Error in readRDS(file) : error reading from connection
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Answer 1

If you have one or more incorrectly installed packages (e.g. because you had to force-reboot during installation) you need to re-install this/these package(s). You can find them using this code:

library(purrr)

.libPaths() %>%
set_names() %>%
map(function(lib) {
    .packages(all.available = TRUE, lib.loc = lib) %>%
    keep(function(pkg) {
        f <- system.file('Meta', 'package.rds', package = pkg, lib.loc = lib)
        tryCatch({readRDS(f); FALSE}, error = function(e) TRUE)
    })
})

This will return a nested list containing the broken packages:

$`/home/yourname/R`
[1] "brokenpkg"

$`/usr/lib64/R/library`
character(0)

$`/usr/share/R/library`
character(0)

You might need to delete the directories 00LOCK- that R created in the library location while trying to install the packages.