Question: I'm trying to organise a growing R project which my team has been collaborating on. My initial thought is to put all the script names into a list

```
 x = list.files(recursive = TRUE)

```

and put it in a spreadsheet so I can go through, thinking about which scripts are obsolete, and which ones probably should form separate projects.

Thankfully, most scripts have a one-line comment at the top which summarises the scripts contents.

Is there an R way to put all those first-row comments in a dataframe? i.e. is there a function in R for extracting lines of code from a filename?

Answer: 
You can read the first line of a file via `readLines(n = 1)`. To read all the first lines, use an apply loop. Then you can just put the result into a data frame.

```
data.frame(comment = sapply(x, readLines, n = 1))

```

where `x` is the character vector of file names.
Try the following:

```
myRFiles = list.files(pattern = "*.R")
firstLines = lapply(myRFiles, FUN =  read.table, nrows = 1, sep = "\n")
df = do.call(rbind, firstLines)

```

`myRFiles` contain all your R files (change the pattern for your case).

With `read.table` you can read the first row (`nrows=1`) and use the newline character (`\n`) as separator, thus only reading one column per file.

Finally join all together into one data frame with `do.call` and `rbind`