如何确定哪些包依赖于 R 中的给定 package？

Question

I have a package in my library and I do not know where it came from. Presumably it was downloaded as a dependency of another package I use. How can I find out which package(s) are dependent on a package of interest?

Answer 1

You can use installed.packages which gives the list of all your installed packages with their dependencies (as a matrix object). Say for instance that you want to find which packages are dependent on rJava :

#get my installed packages
x<-installed.packages()
#find packages dependent on rJava
x[grepl("rJava",x[,"Depends"]),"Package"]
#the result for my R installation
#  XLConnect        xlsx    xlsxjars 
#"XLConnect"      "xlsx"  "xlsxjars"

Answer 2

If you want to find packages dependent on rJava, just use tools package.

library(tools)
dependsOnPkgs("rJava")

Answer 3

Or use the tidyverse way:

library(tidyverse) 
packages <- installed.packages()
required_package <- "rJava"
as_tibble(packages) %>%    
    filter(str_detect(Depends, required_package) | 
           str_detect(Imports, required_package) | 
           str_detect(LinkingTo, required_package)) %>%
    pull(Package)