The State of R Packages Locally

Maelle Salmon and Gabor Csardi walk us through some details about installed packages on a system:

Now how do you know where any of your installed packages was installed? You can use find.package() and path.package()!

To check whether a package is installed, it is better to use find.package() than installed.packages() because the latter, as its docs state, can be slow on some systems. In both cases, it does not mean the package is usable, for that you’d need to use library() or require().

Read on for several tips around where packages are located, what their contents look like, and learning a bit more about the actual code in packages.