Error in getOctD(x, offset, len) : invalid octal digit

Question

I try to install packages (pdbDEMO actually and all the dependencies) and I am encountering an issue, that I cannot solve and I haven't found any solution about it.

I use the R command :

>install.packages("pbdDEMO", lib="C:/Users/xavier_520285/Desktop", type = "source")

Then all the 6 packages are downloaded, but not installed since I get 6 error messages :

Error in getOctD(x, offset, len) : invalid octal digit

I have absolutely no clue about how to fix it.

I would be very grateful with any helpful answer.

Answer 1

As the post above suggests, your tar file is probably corrupt, or it's not a tar file at all.

The easiest way to check it on Linux is to use file <filename> command, a proper .tar.gz file will return something like this:

rJava_0.9-4.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Tue Mar 12 09:54:30 2013

When you are behind a proxy or a firewall and you don't have it properly configured on your computer, oftentimes you will download a html file or a proxy script instead of the file that you are looking for. You can even try to read it as text with head or less:

# head rhdfs_1.0.5.tar.gz
/* NCSC PAC v1.271  */
var Pt;
var Pc;
var ihost;
var NAPROXY="133.183.234.11";
...

Answer 2

Are you doing this with a firewall perhaps? In my case the company's firewall was filtering the download, and ultimately, wget http://cran.fhcrc.org/src/contrib/gdata_2.17.0.tar.gz was downloading an html page from the firewall saying the download was blocked, but install.packages wasn't aware, it just knew that the file was not a valid tarball.