Conda environments disappeared?

[Simone]

Hi all, 

I have a pretty weird problem with conda. I've installed it some time ago and since the beginning it's been hard for me to use it in its 'main' environment as it had some permission conflicts (conda install XXX would give me an error because it couldn't write in its own folder as the owner was root, but sudo conda install XXX wouldn't find the conda program as installed at all). I usually worked with specifically activated environments and left it at that. Today I tried to fix this by setting the permissions and owner of the main folder /home/*username*/anaconda3 to my username instead of root. This did indeed fix the problem; however now when I use source activate *name of environment* I get told the environment does not exist! Running conda env list only gives me the root environment. Any ideas of how can I recover those environments, or in case at least delete the folders so that they don't take space for no reason while I re-create them? Thanks!

[Kale]

Hi Simone,

I'm not 100% sure what's going on just yet, so this may take a little back and forth--but we'll get to the solution eventually!

Can you give me the the output from `ls -al /home/*username*/anaconda3` and `ls -al /home/*username*/anaconda3/envs`?

Kale

[Simone]

Hi Kale,

so, I managed to fix this on my own. Apparently there were no envs in anaconda3; for some reason they were saved in .conda/envs, and not recognized any more. I fixed the issue the hard way, namely cloning the environments from their old folders, then deleting them. It works now. I still have no idea why this happened though, so maybe it could be interesting to look into.

Simone