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I'm on Ubuntu 20.04. R version 4.0.2. I've been using R for a long time and everything worked fine. Today, when trying to install new packages i get this error:

** checking absolute paths in shared objects and dynamic libraries
readelf: symbol lookup error: readelf: undefined symbol: ctf_arc_bufopen, version LIBCTF_1.0
Error in system(paste("readelf -d", shQuote(l)), intern = TRUE) :
  error in running command

I tried to delete and reinstall R and all the packages, but now the same thing happens also for packages that were previously installed. So i think that the problem is not caused by R itself. I havent done any R update recently.

Willinki
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  • Welcome to Stackoverflow. what is the output of `readelf --help` in a terminal? I would say your software building tool chain wants updating . I note your `libclang` tag and don't know if [ctf-suite](https://www.illumos.org/issues/12230) applies. I generally allow `GCC` to do my building unless libclang is required. HTH – Chris May 12 '21 at 12:28
  • Thank you for your quick answer! The output is `readelf: symbol lookup error: readelf: undefined symbol: ctf_arc_bufopen, version LIBCTF_1.0` – Willinki May 12 '21 at 12:33
  • Yes, I read that part above. I meant, when you open up a terminal and type `readelf --help`, what shows up in your terminal as output. – Chris May 12 '21 at 12:43
  • Yes. The line I wrote in the comment before is exactly the output of the command – Willinki May 12 '21 at 12:52
  • Ok, close R or RStudio, because as you say above, it isn't R. Open a terminal, and try `your_prompt:~$ dpkg -l | grep libctf*`, which might report `ii libctf-nobfd0:amd64 2.34-6ubuntu1.1 amd64 Compact C Type Format library (runtime, no BFD dependency) ii libctf0:amd64 2.34-6ubuntu1.1 `, or not. Do same for `readelf --help`. – Chris May 12 '21 at 13:05

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First of all, thank you very much Chris for hinting at the problem. It was actually ctf-suite related. When doing grep libctf* it returned:

ii  libctf0:amd64                                    2.35.1-1ubuntu1
amd64        Compact C Type Format library (runtime, BFD dependency)

So I tried:

sudo apt-get install libctf-nobfd0

and it actually solved the problem. I managed to install all the needed packages.

Willinki
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