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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/08/03#r_for_system_administration"> Thinking inside the box </a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p>Just getting back from the most fun meetup I have been to in quite some time: episode <span>2<sup>3</sup></span> (by their count) of <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Open-Source-Open-Mic/events/241257254/" target="_blank"><em>Open Source Open Mic</em></a> hosted by <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/mattgodbolt" target="_blank">Matt Godbolt</a> and <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/joewalnes" target="_blank">Joe Walnes</a> here in Chicago. Nothing but a sequence of lightning talks. Plus beer and pizza. Sounds awesome? It was!</p>
<p>We had fantastic talks across at least half a dozen languages, covering both new-ish (Pony) and interesting ones such (Rust, Go, …) plus of course some Javascript and some Python, no Java (yay!) and a few batshit crazy things like a self-hosting database in its own (shell) code, a terminal gif viewer (!!), and more. And it gave me an opportunity to quickly (one evening and morning commute) jam out a presentation about what is in the title: <em>R for system administration</em>.</p>
<p>And I am only half-joking. I had used R a couple of years ago when I needed to select, subset, modify, … a large number of image files given some timestamp and filename patterns. And given how well R works <em>in a vectorised manner</em> with both regular expressions and timestamps, as well as on top of essentially all standard POSIX-style operating system / file-system functions, I picked up that thread again on the problem of … cleaning up the file storage underlying <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries" target="_blank">CRANberries</a> which by now has well over fifty-seven thousand (!!) tarballs of CRAN packages based on now ten years of <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries" target="_blank">CRANberries</a>. So I showed how to prune this in essentially half a dozen lines of R (and <a rel="nofollow" href="http://r-datatable.com/" target="_blank">data.table</a> code), plus some motivation—all just right for a lightning talk. Seemingly the talk went well enough as quite a few folks gave a thumbs up and compliments over beers afterwards.</p>
<p>But see for yourself as the slides are now <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/papers/osom-r4sa.pdf" target="_blank">uploaded</a> to my standard <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/presentations/" target="_blank">talks</a> page.</p>
<p>My thanks to Matt and Joe for organizing the meetup. I think I will be back.</p>
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<div>To <strong>leave a comment</strong> for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: <strong><a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/08/03#r_for_system_administration"> Thinking inside the box </a></strong>.</div>
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