I was able to pinpoint the place that I think caused all that horror - it was just a small configuration file "/etc/R/Rprofile.site"
, which I have previously updated with directives borrowed from R experts' posts here on StackOverflow. After removing questionable contents, I was able to run R commands successfully. Out of curiosity and for sharing this hard-earned knowledge, here's the removed contents:
local({
# add DISS_FLOSS_PKGS to the default packages, set a CRAN mirror
DISS_FLOSS_PKGS <- c("RCurl", "digest", "jsonlite",
"stringr", "XML", "plyr")
#old <- getOption("defaultPackages")
r <- getOption("repos")
r["CRAN"] <- "http://cran.us.r-project.org"
#options(defaultPackages = c(old, DISS_FLOSS_PKGS), repos = r)
options(defaultPackages = DISS_FLOSS_PKGS, repos = r)
#lapply(list(DISS_FLOSS_PKGS), function() library)
library(RCurl)
library(digest)
library(jsonlite)
library(stringr)
library(XML)
library(plyr)
})
Any comments on this will be appreciated!