I was just doing this yesterday--the "base R" way would be to simply use readLines() and grep through the same way you would in the command line. You're right t

I was just doing this yesterday--the "base R" way would be to simply use readLines() and grep through the same way you would in the command line. You're right though, grep + awk are super useful and parsing larger-than-memory logs is where they really shine and the shortcomings of R become apparent. However, if your data fits in memory and you have a non-trivial analysis to perform, R is a great choice. I had a file with tabular data interspersed with metadata at random points and it was straightforward to parse and store the data in a custom data structure.