rstudio startup missing value error

RStudio IDE
1

Hi, I'm teaching a course that uses RStudio this semester. I had the students install R and RStudio today and one student's getting an error I can't figure out. Her R installation seems to be working fine. On startup, RStudio gives the following error:

R Session Startup Failure Report

RStudio Version

RStudio 2023.06.2+561 "Mountain Hydrangea " (de44a311, 2023-08-25) for macOS

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) RStudio/2023.06.2+561 Chrome/110.0.5481.208 Electron/23.3.0 Safari/537.36

Error message

[No error available]

Process Output

The R session exited with code 1.

Error output:


[No errors emitted]

Standard output:


[No output emitted]

Logs

MISSING VALUE


MISSING VALUE

Note that she's currently running a version of RStudio from last June; we got an identical error when installing with the most recent version.

We tried resetting the Desktop state, but didn't have any luck. Do any of you know know what's going on?

2

Just a couple ideas.

This suggests there is a problem opening the R session. Can she open R from the terminal without trouble? You can see here how RStudio finds R.

Second idea, especially if RStudio used to work at some point in the past and something changed, you can try resetting the internal state as described here.

See also the systematic troubleshooting guide here.

3

Hi AlexisW, thanks so much for your help! The student ended up solving the issue by working with our IT department. Interestingly, R opened fine from the terminal, it was only using RStudio that caused issues. We also tried resetting the internal state, to no avail.

I believe the eventual solution involved creating a new user profile on her Mac, downloading RStudio with that profile, and then combining the two user profiles. I'm not sure exactly what the issue was, but, in trying to reset the internal state on her computer, I'd found that she had some (in my experience unorthodox) permissions set up for even stuff as minor as creating new folders. I'm not sure what generated that permission structure, but if I had to guess, it is the reason she had trouble using RStudio originally.

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