[R-sig-Fedora] Error "translateCharUTF8' must be called on a CHARSXP Execution halted"

[Braun, Stefan]

Dear list,

I installed R 3.3.2 on a Red Hat Linux Enterprise 7.3 machine by adding the EPEL-repository and then installing it via yum.
R starts up and seems to be doing fine at first sight. However, when I try to list the files in a directory with the command

files <- list.files(path="/home/username/directory_name/", pattern="*.Rda",, full.names=T, recursive=FALSE)

I get the error

translateCharUTF8' must be called on a CHARSXP
Execution halted

On my local windows machine the command works fine.
Googling this nothing really comes up except that the installation might be broken. (See http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/list-files-error-message-translateCharUTF8-must-be-called-on-a-CHARSXP-td3250302.html)

The strange thing is, that if I copy and paste the command into R and execute it, it does not work, but if I copy and paste it into R and change that command in a way that should not change its result but only add spaces or something like that it might run. E.g. changing it to

files <- list.files(path = "/home/username/directory_name/", pattern = "*.Rda",, full.names = T, recursive = FALSE)

might work, might not work and return the same error, or might execute but when I then type "files" that might return

[1]Error: 'getCharCE' must be called on a CHARSXP

The sessionInfo commmand gives me:
sessionInfo()
R version 3.3.2 (2016-10-31)
Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.3 (Maipo)

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

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

uname -mrs gives me:
Linux 3.10.0-514.el7.x86_64 x86_64

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Stefan Braun

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