Cannot uninstall numpy 1.21.2, RECORD file not found

Question

I encountered a problem while installing pip install pytorch-nlp The erro is as follow:

ERROR: Could n`ot install packages due to an OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'c:\\users\\pcpcpc\\anaconda3\\envs\\pytorch\\lib\\site-packages\\numpy-1.21`.2.dist-info\\METADATA'

SO I tried to reinstall numpy by

pip install --force-reinstall --no-deps numpy==1.21.2

But I get the error:

ERROR: Cannot uninstall numpy 1.21.2, RECORD file not found. You might be able to recover from this via: 'pip install --force-reinstall --no-deps numpy==1.21.2'.

Answer 1

As @Phoenix suggested, you might have an incomplete installation of numpy in your site-packages folder.

1. Find your site-packages folder.

SITE_PACKAGES_FOLDER=$(python3 -c "import sysconfig; print(sysconfig.get_paths()['purelib'])")
echo $SITE_PACKAGES_FOLDER

2. Check for extraneous numpy packages from your site-packages folder.

ls $SITE_PACKAGES_FOLDER/numpy*

3. Trash extraneous packages.

pip install trash-cli
trash $SITE_PACKAGES_FOLDER/numpy*

4. Reinstall numpy.

pip install --upgrade numpy

Answer 2

Try manually deleting the numpy files/directories and then do

pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall <package>

One way to find the numpy files is to run

python -c "import numpy; print(numpy.__file__)"

For example, this prints out

/home/tink-user/workspace/.conda_envs/tink-payment-categorization/lib/python3.7/site-packages/numpy/__init__.py

for me. So you can go there:

cd /home/tink-user/workspace/.conda_envs/tink-payment-categorization/lib/python3.7/site-packages

then you can check with something like this to see which numpys are there:

ls numpy*
ls | grep numpy

Delete the numpy directories and try force reinstalling (pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall <package>).

Conda

This also happened to me in a conda environment after I ended up with multiple numpy installations and tried to manually delete them by removing the directories in site-packages. I had to force reinstall with conda (I think after manually deleting the directories for numpy): conda install numpy --force-reinstall.

Answer 3

• None of the above solutions worked for me

What worked for me:

• Delete that particular folder from the site-packages
  • Only delete the folder with the version number and not the folder that has python modules and files
  • Delete that folder with metadata files matching the numpy version in the warning and error message in the installation traceback
• re-install the package
  • pip install numpy just as you would do
• this work for both cases
  • global environment
  • local or project related environment
• ** else you will have delete that environment and create a new one **