Problems with XLConnect library - Windows 64 bit

Question

I just started with Rstudio programming and I have some issues with XLConnect.

I was able to install "XLConnect" package, then tried to load the "XLConnect" library and got an error as below.

library(XLConnect)

ERROR: package or namespace load failed for'XLconnect':

.onload failed in loadNamespace() for XLConnect, details:

Call. System2("cat",c("/etc/*-release"), stdout =TRUE, stderr = TRUE) error: ' "cat" not found.



sessionInfo()
R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19042)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=Italian_Switzerland.1252 LC_CTYPE=Italian_Switzerland.1252 LC_MONETARY=Italian_Switzerland.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=Italian_Switzerland.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.1.0 tools_4.1.0 rJava_1.0-4

Any help would be really appreciated!

Thanks

Answer 1

This is a bug in XLConnect 1.0.3, where it requires cat to be installed on Windows. We fixed it in 1.0.4, so upgrading is the easiest way to fix the problem.

If for some reason you can't upgrade, you may try to install cat on Windows, e.g. using MINGW-w64.

See https://github.com/miraisolutions/xlconnect/issues/132 for the discussion.