R: Report Versions of Third-Party Software

extSoftVersion {base}

R Documentation

Report Versions of Third-Party Software

Description

Report versions of (external) third-party software used.

Usage

extSoftVersion()

Details

The reports the versions of third-party software libraries in use. These are often external but might have been compiled into R when it was installed.

With dynamic linking, these are the versions of the libraries linked to in this session: with static linking, of those compiled in.

Value

A named character vector, currently with components

`zlib`	The version of `zlib` in use.
`bzlib`	The version of `bzlib` (from `bzip2`) in use.
`xz`	The version of `liblzma` (from `xz`) in use.
`libdeflate`	The version of `libdeflate` (if any otherwise `""`) used when R was built.
`PCRE`	The version of `PCRE` in use. PCRE1 has versions < 10.00, PCRE2 has versions >= 10.00.
`ICU`	The version of `ICU` in use (if any, otherwise `""`).
`TRE`	The version of `libtre` in use.
`iconv`	The implementation and version of the `iconv` library in use (if known).
`readline`	The version of `readline` in use (if any, otherwise `""`). If using the emulation by `libedit` aka `editline` this will be `"EditLine wrapper"` preceded by the `readline` version it emulates: that is most likely to be seen on macOS.
`BLAS`	Name of the binary/executable file with the implementation of `BLAS` in use (if known, otherwise `""`).

Note that the values for bzlib and pcre normally contain a date as well as the version number, and that for tre includes several items separated by spaces, the version number being the second.

For iconv this will give the implementation as well as the version, for example "GNU libiconv 1.14", "glibc 2.18" or "win_iconv" (which has no version number).

The name of the binary/executable file for BLAS can be used as an indication of which implementation is in use. Typically, the R version of BLAS will appear as libR.so (libR.dylib), R or libRblas.so (libRblas.dylib), depending on how R was built. Note that libRblas.so (libRblas.dylib) may also be shown for an external BLAS implementation that had been copied, hard-linked or renamed by the system administrator. For an external BLAS, a shared object file will be given and its path/name may indicate the vendor/version. The detection does not work on Windows nor for some uses of the Accelerate framework on macOS.

Examples

extSoftVersion()
## the PCRE version
sub(" .*", "", extSoftVersion()["PCRE"])