Error in installation a R package

Question

Please help me, I cannot install "MASS" package.

> library(MASS) Error in library(MASS) : there is no package called ‘MASS’ 

I tried to install MASS package from local:

> utils:::menuInstallLocal()   package ‘MASS’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked   Warning: cannot remove prior installation of package ‘MASS’ 

Even I cannot remove "MASS":

> remove.packages("MASS")   Removing package from ‘C:/Program Files/R/R-3.0.1/library’   (as ‘lib’ is unspecified)   Error in find.package(pkgs, lib) : there is no package called ‘MASS’ 

Also with this option I couldn't install package:

> options(install.lock=T)   > utils:::menuInstallLocal()   package ‘MASS’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked   Warning: cannot remove prior installation of package ‘MASS’   Warning: restored ‘MASS’   Warning message:   In file.copy(savedcopy, lib, recursive = TRUE) :     problem copying C:\Program Files\R\R-3.0.1\library\00LOCK\MASS\libs\x64\MASS.dll to C:\Program Files\R\R-3.0.1\library\MASS\libs\x64\MASS.dll: Permission  

And with install.packages:

> install.packages("C:\\MASS_7.3-35.zip",repos=NULL) package ‘MASS’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked   Warning: cannot remove prior installation of package ‘MASS’   Warning: restored ‘MASS’   Warning message:   In file.copy(savedcopy, lib, recursive = TRUE) :     problem copying C:\Program Files\R\R-3.0.1\library\00LOCK\MASS\libs\x64\MASS.dll to C:\Program Files\R\R-3.0.1\library\MASS\libs\x64\MASS.dll: Permission  

I should mention I use R with ORE (Oracle R Enterprise).

Answer 1

There could be a few things happening here. Start by first figuring out your library location:

Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER") 

or

.libPaths() 

We already know yours from the info you gave: C:\Program Files\R\R-3.0.1\library

I believe you have a file in there called: 00LOCK. From ?install.packages:

Note that it is possible for the package installation to fail so badly that the lock directory is not removed: this inhibits any further installs to the library directory (or for --pkglock, of the package) until the lock directory is removed manually.

You need to delete that file. If you had the pacman package installed you could have simply used p_unlock() and the 00LOCK file is removed. You can't install pacman now until the 00LOCK file is removed.

To install pacman use:

install.packages("pacman") 

There may be a second issue. This is where you somehow corrupted MASS. This can occur, in my experience, if you try to update a package while it is in use in another R session. I'm sure there's other ways to cause this as well. To solve this problem try:

1. Close out of all R sessions (use task manager to ensure you're truly R session free) Ctrl + Alt + Delete
2. Go to your library location Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER"). In your case this is: C:\Program Files\R\R-3.0.1\library
3. Manually delete the MASS package
4. Fire up a vanilla session of R
5. Install MASS via install.packages("MASS")

If any of this works please let me know what worked.