I'm trying to collapse a data frame by removing all but one row from each group of rows with identical values in a particular column. In other words, the first row from each group. For example, I'd like to convert this > d = data.frame(x=c(1,1,2,4),y=c(10,11,12,13),z=c(20,19,18,17)) > d x y z 1 1 10 20 2 1 11 19 3 2 12 18 4 4 13 17 Into this: x y z 1 1 11 19 2 2 12 18 3 4 13 17 I'm using aggregate to do this currently, but the performance is unacceptable with more data: > d.ordered = d[order(-d$y),] > aggregate(d.ordered,by=list(key=d.ordered$x),FUN=function(x){x[1]}) I've tried split/unsplit with the same function argument as here, but unsplit complains about duplicate row numbers. Is rle a possibility? Is there an R idiom to convert rle's length vector into the indices of the rows that start each run, which I can then use to pluck those rows out of the data frame?