Error loading packages, command 'tar' missing from path?

On Mar 5, 2009, at 4:42 , Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

To Simon: this was Mac-specific as only on Macs does  
install.packages use this piece of code (and we had a surplus comma  
in the gettextf call).

I've never used 10.4.11 and don't know if /usr/bin/tar is part of  
the base OS or of Xcode on that version.  I was hoping the Mac  
aficionados would know, my main reason for referring Andrew here.

tar is part of the base system, i.e. it is always installed on OS X  
(no Xcode needed). On the Tiger DVD it's in
/System/Installation/Packages/BaseSystem.pkg
so you can restore it from there.

On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, Andrew J. Rominger wrote:

Thanks to all for your help and suggestions.  I apparently did  
somehow delete tar.  In the terminal i get:

$ which tar
no tar in /usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin /usr/local/bin /usr/X11R6/ 
bin

Sorry to be a little slow, but I'm not familiar with working in  
the terminal so I'm sure there is a way to "reset" the path--but I  
don't know how to do it.  And I don't want to mess anything up any  
more!  Could anyone direct me as to where I can properly learn  
about resetting the path to include tar?

Thanks very much--
Andy


----- Original Message -----
From: "Simon Urbanek" <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>
To: "Andrew J. Rominger" <rominger at stanford.edu>
Cc: r-sig-mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2009 7:31:26 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada  
Pacific
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] Error loading packages, command 'tar'  
missing from path?


On Mar 3, 2009, at 17:52 , Andrew J. Rominger wrote:

Hello all,

My appologies for any possible cross-posting--I originally posted a
version of this to R-Help, but was refered to r-sig-mac because
apparently my problem is mac-specific.

It is specific to your system - experience (see archives) shows that
either you somehow changed the default PATH and it doesn't include /
usr/bin anymore or you have somehow deleted tar (/usr/bin/tar).

Cheers,
S

I'm running R2.8.1 on a Mac OS 10.4.11.  While trying to install  
the
package gdata, I was presented with the following (error at end of
report):

install.packages("gdata")

also installing the dependency ?gtools?

trying URL 'http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/bin/macosx/universal/contrib/2.8/gtools_2.5.0-1.tgz'
Content type 'application/x-tar' length 85484 bytes (83 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 83 Kb

trying URL 'http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/bin/macosx/universal/contrib/2.8/gdata_2.4.2.tgz'
Content type 'application/x-tar' length 539301 bytes (526 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 526 Kb

/bin/sh: line 1: tar: command not found
2009-03-02 20:42:06.081 R[357] tossing reply message sequence 3 on
thread 0x1ce3ae0
Error in sprintf(gettext(fmt, domain = domain), ...) :
argument is missing, with no default


It seems that 'tar' is missing which (I'm guessing) leads to an
error in sprintf().  I've never been presented with this error
before.  I tried loading various other packages and received the
same error.  When the error first appeared, I was running R2.5.3.
After upgrading to R2.8.1 the error persists.

Thanks in advance for any help--
Andy Rominger

-- 
Andrew Rominger
Department of Biology
Stanford University
rominger at stanford.edu
(650) 862-6063

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595