tryCatch not catching error produced by install.packages within RStudio

Question

Consider the following usage:

tryCatch(log(\"a\"), error = function(e) NULL)
#NULL

Now I\'m trying to do essentially the same, but in a more co

Answer 1

RStudio does not exectute the normal install.packages but instead does its own thing:

look at the code in RStudio:

> install.packages
function (...) 
.rs.callAs(name, hook, original, ...)
<environment: 0x3e4b478>
> .rs.callAs
function (name, f, ...) 
{
    withCallingHandlers(tryCatch(f(...), error = function(e) {
        cat("Error in ", name, " : ", e$message, "\n", sep = "")
    }), warning = function(w) {
        cat("Warning in ", name, " :\n  ", w$message, "\n", sep = "")
        invokeRestart("muffleWarning")
    })
}
<environment: 0x3bafa38>

weird code, it recalls itself ... i was expecting a .Primitive() somewhere

> sum
function (..., na.rm = FALSE)  .Primitive("sum")

but it is an ugly RStudio hack. if you look at install.packages in normal R you get:

head(install.packages) # it is really long :P
1 function (pkgs, lib, repos = getOption("repos"), contriburl = contrib.url(repos, 2 type), method, available = NULL, destdir = NULL, dependencies = NA,
3 type = getOption("pkgType"), configure.args = getOption("configure.args"),
4 configure.vars = getOption("configure.vars"), clean = FALSE,
5 Ncpus = getOption("Ncpus", 1L), verbose = getOption("verbose"),
6 libs_only = FALSE, INSTALL_opts, quiet = FALSE, keep_outputs = FALSE,
....

Answer 2

Use the namespaced invocation:

utils::install.packages()

Answer 3

I'm going to suggest closing as off-topic because this is an RStudio problem. Basically, tryCatch is catching the error, but RStudio's error handler prints the error anyway. Thus the reason you're getting a return value:

[[1]]
NULL

[[2]]
NULL

This means tryCatch works. RStudio just prints caught errors weirdly.