"installation of package 'FILE_PATH' had non-zero exit status" in R

Question

By installing the package in R using the following command:

install.packages('FILE_PATH', repos=NULL, type = "source")

I got the following error:

Installing package into ‘/home/p/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.0’ (as ‘lib’ is unspecified) Errore in rawToChar(block[seq_len(ns)]) : embedded nul in string: 'PK03042402]xadVCrxcbxeaxfcRxa727bivpois-Rcode/.Rhistory+xce/-JNxd5POxca,+xc8xcf,xd6+ILxcaIxd5vRxd7xe4xe5*x86Jxe5xe4xea%25`xa5dxa2v楖xe7%xe6' Warning message: In install.packages("/home/p/Research/14_bivpois-Rcode.zip", repos = NULL, : installation of package ‘/home/p/Research/14_bivpois-Rcode.zip’ had non-zero exit status

The R version is the 3.0.2 (2013-09-25) -- "Frisbee Sailing" and the OS is Linux Mint (UNIX).

Why Do I get that error and what does it mean:

installation of package ‘/home/p/Research/14_bivpois-Rcode.zip’ had non-zero exit status

in R?

You can find the package here and the file 14_bivpois-Rcode.zip is the source.

I tried to install that locally and the path is the correct one.

Any suggestion to install that package in UNIX?

Answer 1

The .zip file provided by the authors is not a valid R package, and they do state that the source is for "direct use" in R (by which I assume they mean it's necessary to load the included functions manually). The non-zero exit status simply indicates that there was an error during the installation of the "package".

You can extract the archive manually and then load the functions therein with, e.g., source('bivpois.table.R'), or you can download the .RData file they provide and load that into the workspace with load('.RData'). This does not install the functions as part of a package; rather, it loads the functions into your global environment, making them temporarily available.

You can download, extract, and load the .RData from R as follows:

download.file('http://stat-athens.aueb.gr/~jbn/papers/files/14/14_bivpois_RDATA.zip', 
              f <- tempfile())
unzip(f, exdir=tempdir())
load(file.path(tempdir(), '.RData'))

If you want the .RData file to be available in the current working directory, to be loaded in the future, you could use the following instead:

download.file('http://stat-athens.aueb.gr/~jbn/papers/files/14/14_bivpois_RDATA.zip', 
              f <- tempfile())
unzip(f, exdir=tempdir())
file.copy(file.path(tempdir(), '.RData'), 'bivpois.RData')
# the above copies the .RData file to a file called bivpois.RData in your current 
# working directory.
load('bivpois.RData')

In future R sessions, you can just call load('bivpois.RData').