Recently I have heard reports like the one below a couple of times: Tineke Casneuf wrote: > However I did encouter an error when trying to install a self-made dummy > package. I am sure it is not due to the package because it can be build on > someone else's windows PC. > > The error message is *rm: failed to get attributes of `/': No such file or > directory. Today I saw one live, and managed to track down the problem. Cygwin (from which the Windows R toolset gets a number of utilities), stores information on its mounts in the Windows registry. If you later uninstall it but leave the registry entries in place, you'll get an error like the above. The rm utility thinks that "/" refers to a directory like c:\cygwin, but such a directory doesn't exist.
I don't know if this is a bug in the Cygwin uninstaller (which I would say should remove registry entries once they are no longer valid), in rm (which should ignore mounts that don't make sense), or if it is user error. But the fix is quite simple: look in the registry (under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cygnus Solutions\Cygwin\mounts v2, or the same location in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE), and remove any invalid mounts. I will modify the Rtools installer to work around this problem. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
